GIFT  OF 


MESSAGES  TO  MOTHERS 


A  PROTEST  AGAINST 
ARTIFICIAL  METHODS 

Presenting  a  Simple, 

Practical  and  Natural  Scheme  for 

the  Right  Diet,  Care  and  Treatment  of 

Mother  and  Child,  and  for  the  Conservation  of 

Power  in  Physiological  Functions,  the 

Result  of  Twenty-three  Years 

of  Successful  Practice 


BY 

HERMAN  PARTSCH,  M.  D. 

AUTHOR  OF 

THE  ILLS  OF 

INDIGESTION,  THEIR  CAUSES 
AND  THEIR  CURES 


PAUL  ELDER  AND  COMPANY 

SAN  FRANCISCO 
AND  NEW  YORK 


Copyright,  1908 
PAUL  ELDER  AND  COMPANY 


Preface 


THIS  work  is  the  combined  utilitarian  re- 
sults of  a  series  of  vital  human-nature 
studies ;  as  pursued  by  a  regular  physi- 
cian in  the  course  of  twenty -three  years 
of  practice.    The  work  is  offered  as  a  contribution 
to  the  common  stock  of  hygienic  learning. 

It  is  addressed  primarily  to  mothers,  because  it 
concerns  them  chiefly,  and  because  the  writer  there- 
fore regards  them  as  the  most  impartial  judges  of 
the  findings  presented,  and  because  through  women 
lies  the  line  of  host  resistance  to  these  particular 
steps  in  the  progress  of  hygienic  learning.  If  my 
work  passes  woman's  trial  and  judgment,  it  will 
receive  the  serious  attention  of  the  medical  profes- 
sion all  the  sooner  for  having  been  first  submitted 
to  women. 

I  do  not  encourage  the  domestic  practice  of 
medicine,  and,  with  one  harmless  exception,  have 
not  mentioned  a  drug  or  a  medicine. 

I  recognize  a  subconscious  intelligence,  other- 
wise referred  to  as  nature  or  instinct,  the  prompt- 
ings of  which  are  called  intuitions. 

iii 


399544 


Preface 


These  intuitions  I  have  sought  to  understand 
and  have  learned  to  trust  unreservedly,  and  in  all 
matters  of  food  selection  and  rejection  I  do  so  trust 
them  and  am  by  the  results  fully  justified  in  so 
doing. 

Accordingly,  in  the  dietary  details  of  the  treat- 
ment of  disease,  I  must  differ  radically  from  the 
prevailing  practice  of  the  medical  profession  gen- 
erally. 

The  prevailing  scheme  of  practice,  for  example, 
in  the  great  group  of  digestive  disorders,  especially 
of  young  children,  does  not  succeed,  and  I  have  no 
doubt  about  the  propriety  of  assailing  it,  especially 
since  I  have  an  extremely  simple,  successful  and 
perfectly  natural  scheme  to  offer  in  its  stead. 

H.  P. 

Berkeley,  California. 


IV 


Contents 


Page 

Preface Hi 

Chapter 

I.  Power  in  Physiological  Functions.      .      1 

And  in  All  Organization,  Growth  and  Work 

II.  Sickness  of  Pregnancy £S 

Its  Cause  Revealed  and  Its  Prevention  Explained 

III.  Natural  Infant  Feeding     .     ...    45 

The  Reason  Why  It  Fails  and  the  Way  It  Will 
Succeed 

IV.  The  Maternity  Nurse 61 

Spontaneous  Intuition  Compared  with  Artificial 
Training 

V.  Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period      .     .     .    67 

Their  Causes,  Results^  Prevention  and  Cure 

VI.  Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections    .     .116 

The  Merits  of  the  Natural  and  the  Evils  of  the 
Artificial 

VII.  Some  Failures  at  School      ....  138 

Why   They   Occur   and   How    They  May   be 
Avoided 


Chapter  I 

Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

And  in  All  Organization,  Growth 
and  Work 

A,  PERSONS  who  are  successfully  en- 
gaged in  affairs  mechanical  agree  that 
perpetual   motion   is   a   fallacy,  that 
nothing  mechanical  can  be  done  with- 
out power  to  do  it.   But  all  sorts  of  authorities 
ignore  the  idea  of  power  being  involved  in  phys- 
iological functions.   One  whose  word  has  weight 
has  even  declared  to  me  that  no  power,  or  at  any 
rate  no  appreciable  amount  of  power,  was  in- 
volved  in  the  organization,  development   and 
growth  of  a  fetus. 

It  will  only  be  necessary  to  present  a  series  of 
familiar  and  interesting  fa6ls,  and  the  conclu- 
sion becomes  apparent  and  evident  that  power 
is  involved  in  all  forms  of  organization,  develop- 
ment ana  growth.  This  conclusion  is  almost  the 
entire  foundation  of  my  book,  and  I  must  neces- 
sarily devote  considerable  space  to  the  very  in- 
teresting grounds  upon  which  it  is  based. 

We  cannot  successfully  employ  at  the  same 
time,  for  distinctly  different  purposes,  a  com- 
bination of  muscles  and  a  combination  of  mental 

1 


Messages  to  Mothers 


faculties.  The  superintendent  in  a  factory  stopped 
a  foreman  who  was  about  to  lend  a  hand  at  some 
heavy  lifting.  Said  the  superintendent  to  the 
foreman:  "I  don't  want  you  to  work,  I  want 
you  to  think;  and  I  do  n't  want  these  men  to 
think,  I  want  them  to  work,"  alluding  to  the 
laborers. 

Much  reading  and  knowing  are  very  likely 
to  involve  the  habit  of  thinking  automatically 
and  not  to  the  purpose  of  the  work  in  hand 
and  thus  spoil  a  person  for  a  good  occupation 
without  qualifying  him  for  any  other.  The  illit- 
erate servant  who  knows  his  business  is  better 
and  more  efficient  than  the  scholarly  one  who 
knows  much  else;  this  is  apparent  in  the  com- 
parison of  Chinese  and  Japanese,  whether  as 
servants  or  otherwise.  The  best  farmers  I  ever 
knew  were  illiterate  men,  but  by  no  means  ig- 
norant in  regard  to  the  essentials  of  their  work 
and  their  business.  The  best  business  men  are 
also  comparatively  illiterate,  but  they  know  and 
do  business  better  than  the  men  who  know  and 
think  a  good  deal  besides. 

Recently  I  was  much  interested  in  what  proved 
to  be  better  and  cheaper  than  an  experiment  for 
my  purpose.  I  observed  the  doings  of  two  men, 
a  gardener  and  his  employer,  on  the  grounds  of 
the  latter  for  one  week, — the  gardener  working 
at  somewhat  skilled  labor  all  the  more  atten- 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

tively  because  the  employer  was  constantly 
present,  and  the  employer  steadily  talking  all 
day  and  compelling  the  gardener  to  pay  atten- 
tion and  talk  also.  The  gardener  was  a  good, 
natural,  unsophisticated  character,  not  disposed 
to  strike  nor  even  to  display  any  sign  of  the 
agony  within  him.  The  employer  did  not  know 
that  a  gardener  has  not  power  enough  to  oper- 
ate his  muscular  instrumentalities  and  his  mental 
instrumentalities  at  the  same  time  for  different 
and  unrelated  purposes.  At  the  conclusion  of 
the  six  days'  service  the  gardener  found  himself 
thinner,  weaker,  irritable,  dyspeptic,  tired  and 
almost  prostrated.  Now  ordinarily  a  man  is  sup- 
posed to  keep  strong  and  well  at  gardening,  and 
mere  talking  is  not  suspected  of  prostrating 
anybody,  but  it  was  the  thinking  in  addition  to 
the  working  that  used  up  more  power  than  his 
food  supplied  him  and  caused  him  to  draw  upon 
his  power-storage  battery  of  fat  and  burn  that 
out  to  the  extent  of  making  his  shrinkage  as 
plainly  apparent  to  others  as  his  fatigue  and  dis- 
tress were  to  himself. 

The  brain  and  muscles  are  instruments  of 
labor.  They  are  under  ordinary  circumstances 
not  injured  during  periods  of  aclion  more  than 
what  is  easily  restored  during  periods  of  rest. 
But  an  instrument  can  never  do  anything  any- 
where on  its  own  account,  it  must  always  require 

3 


Messages  to  Mothers 


power  to  operate  it;  it  is  the  power  that  does  the 
work. 

It  requires  much  more  power  to  operate  the 
brain  in  the  processes  of  voluntary  and  designed 
thinking  than  it  does  to  operate  any  combina- 
tion of  muscles  at  the  hardest  manual  labor  dur- 
ing the  same  length  of  time.  From  any  com- 
parison of  the  maximum  number  of  hours  at 
mental  labor  and  at  manual  labor,  respectively, 
that  men  can  endure  per  day  and  retain  their 
normal  weight  with  good  digestion,  sleep  and 
good  temper,  it  is  deducible  that  an  hour  of 
purely  original  mental  work  costs  even  more 
power  than  two  and  one-half  hours  of  hard  man- 
ual labor. 

Ignorance  of  this  fa6l  has  cost  a  great  many 
thinkers  a  great  deal  of  illness  and  it  has  even 
cost  the  lives  of  many  at  the  very  commence- 
ment of  their  careers.  The  only  two  essentials 
involved  in  labor  of  any  kind  are  the  instrument 
and  the  power.  Of  course  there  is  a  directing 
intelligence  which  also  involves  an  instrumen- 
tality and  also  requires  power. 

When  a  man  works  beyond  the  point  of  fatigue 
he  becomes  disabled,  however  slight  his  disability 
may  be.  This  disability  means  that  he  has  either 
exhausted  his  supply  of  power  for  the  present, 
or  that  he  has  disabled  his  instrument.  No  doubt 
many  cases  of  disabled  brains  occur  and  result 

4 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

from  overtime  mental  work.  Cases  of  this  kind 
occur  every  year  in  any  community  where  strenu- 
ous intellectual  pursuits  prevail;  a  few  at  least 
being  reported,  more  must  occur  than  the  public 
becomes  aware  of.  Often  the  obituary  of  a 
young  man  emphasizes  his  unusual  ability,  and 
it  seems  as  if  the  strenuous  efforts  of  the  prodigy, 
encouraged  by  parents  and  teachers  to  improve 
on  the  natural  gifts  possessed,  involved  the  use 
of  mental  faculties  to  an  extent  that  ruined 
them,  with  illness  and  death  as  the  final  result. 
In  the  persistent  effort  to  make  more  of  what  is 
already  a  youthful  musical  prodigy,  he  is  de- 
prived of  his  natural  and  necessary  childish  play 
and  associations,  confined  indoors,  exhibited  in 
the  lime-light  at  untimely  hours  and  worked 
excessively  on  matters  that  are  hard  and  diffi- 
cult enough  for  mature  mental  instrumentalities. 
His  career  is  brilliant  but  short;  excessive  and 
prolonged  strain  serves  as  cause  of  a  break  in  the 
instrumentality,  and  the  career  ends,  often  in 
death. 

An  editor  told  me  of  two  brilliant  young  men, 
assistants  to  his  position,  who  committed  suicide. 
In  addition  to  their  prescribed  work  of  six  hours 
daily,  six  days  a  week,  both  these  men  did  much 
extra  work  of  the  purely  original  mental  kind 
with  a  view  to  improving  their  qualifications  for 
advancement.  I  am  told  that  editorial  writers 


Messages  to  Mothers 


are  allotted  six  hours  a  day,  six  days  a  week,  for 
work,  and  that  they  break  down  at  about  forty 
years  of  age,  the  weaker  ones  sooner,  while  the 
stronger  ones  last  longer.  The  aspiring  young 
man  in  such  a  position  who,  in  spite  of  feeling 
to  the  contrary,  insists  on  spending  some  re- 
maining hours  at  hard  mental  work  is,  of  course, 
in  danger  of  being  wrecked  long  before  forty 
and,  perhaps,  fatally.  There  are  lessons  in  these 
cases  of  illness,  insanity,  suicide  and  sometimes 
murder,  but  the  utility  of  them  is  not  much  ap- 
propriated. 

Cases  in  which  the  disability,  or  illness,  is  due 
to  exhaustion  of  power,  in  which  the  brain  as  an 
instrumentality  remains  intact,  are  numerous 
and  conspicuous;  the  subjects  of  such  cases  live 
with  sound  minds  to  a  good  old  age  generally 
and,  though  quite  miserable  and  almost  con- 
stantly sick,  they  generally  recover  their  health 
spontaneously  during  old  age.  The  reason  for 
their  recovery  is  that  they  have  retired  from 
work  and  now,  power  being  no  longer  excessively 
drawn  upon  for  overtime  work,  they  have  enough 
power  for  digestion  and  bodily  maintenance  in 
general.  These  almost  life-long  invalids  of  body, 
but  sound  of  mind,  with  their  recovery  of  good 
health  on  retirement,  prove  that  the  brain  as  an 
instrument  of  labor  in  their  cases  was  not  dam- 
aged by  the  habitual  overtime  work  which  kept 

6 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

them  sick  for  years.  That  they  recovered  on  re- 
tirement proves  that  their  dyspepsia  was  due  to 
their  appropriation  of  so  much  power  for  their 
work  that  not  enough  was  left  for  digestion. 

Dyspepsia  was  the  salvation  of  such  men  as 
Schiller,  Darwin,  Carlyle,  Herbert  Spencer  and 
many  others.  For,  had  not  the  sufferings  of  one 
day  compelled  them  to  rest  the  next  and  given 
nature  a  chance  for  at  least  a  partial  restoration, 
they  would  have  ruined  their  instruments  so 
early  in  life  as  not  to  have  heen  heard  of  beyond 
the  small  circle  in  which  the  misfortune  had  oc- 
curred. Had  they  had  the  power  to  work  sixteen 
hours  a  day,  seven  days  a  week,  they  would  have 
tried  to  use  their  instruments  of  mental  labor 
that  long.  It  was  power  that  failed  them;  they 
must  have  felt  and,  I  suppose,  to  some  vague 
extent  must  have  understood  this,  but  they  did 
not  understand  that  their  digestion  in  particular 
and  their  physical  maintenance  in  general  failed 
because  the  power  for  these  purposes  was  diverted" 
to  operate  the  brain. 

As  early  as  1859,  and  more  plainly  in  1874,* 
the  late  Professor  Joseph  Le  Conte  showed  and 
explained  that  all  the  forces  of  Nature  are  cor- 
related and  transmutable,  that  all  the  different 
forces  of  Nature  are  only  different  forms  of  the 
same  energy.  In  accordance  with  these  most 

*  " The  Conservation  of  Energy." —  STEWART. 


Messages  to  Mothers 


useful  facts,  first  taught  by  Le  Conte,  we  may  as 
well  admit — we  can  almost  see  in  ourselves  that 
we  must  admit — that  all  the  different  energies  in 
the  animal  body  are  correlated  and  transmu- 
table.  In  our  bodies,  the  heat,  motion,  elec- 
tricity, and  digestive,  growing,  healing  and 
mental  energies,  and  the  chemical  energies  of 
our  foods  and  our  fat,  are  all  only  different 
forms  of  the  same  force. 

As  I  am  only  considering  energy  or  force  as 
an  agent  which,  through  some  instrumentality, 
accomplishes  some  work  in  the  body,  I  use  the 
same  word  that  is  employed  in  factories  and 
shops.  Force  applied  to  work  in  a  shop  is  called 
power.  The  fundamental  proposition  in  this  dis- 
cussion is,  that  it  requires  power  to  operate 
every  function  of  every  organ  and  of  every  cell 
in  the  body.  We  shall  see  that  mental  work, 
muscular  work,  digestive  work  and  the  work  of 
physical  maintenance  of  the  body  in  good  order, 
are  all  performed  by  the  same  power  in  different 
forms. 

Normally  we  all  take  in  fuel  enough  to  give 
us  a  large  surplus  of  power  beyond  what  is  re- 
quired for  bodily  functions  and  maintenance. 
This  surplus  is  available  for  what  we  call  work. 
The  body  that  is  maintained  in  good  order  has 
also  a  power-storage  battery,  which  is  simply 
stored  fuel  in  the  form  of  fat,  which  will  supply 

8 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

power  to  maintain  the  bodily  functions  and 
even  to  do  work  when,  on  account  of  sickness, 
we  cannot  take  food  and  when,  owing  to  such 
misfortunes  as  are  happening  somewhere  any 
time,  we  cannot  get  it. 

Our  fat  is  our  power-storage  battery.  When 
not  otherwise  useful  it  may  at  least  be  orna- 
mental. To  the  migratory  bird,  the  hybernating 
bear,  the  ship-wrecked  mariner,  the  besieged 
soldier  and  sick  patient,  the  storage  battery, 
when  there  is  one,  supplies  the  power  to  bridge 
the  interval  between  meals.  This  interval  may 
be,  for  the  migrating  bird  long  enough  for  him 
to  fly  two  thousand  miles,  for  a  hybernating 
animal  a  whole  winter  season,  for  a  patient  the 
duration  of  his  illness,  for  a  ship-wrecked  mar- 
iner or  a  besieged  soldier,  this  interval  between 
meals  may  be  endured  until  either  has,  for  the 
sake  of  power,  burned  up  his  timbers  to  an  ex- 
tent, according  to  "  Yeo's  Physiology,"  as  follows: 

Fat  97  per  cent 

Muscle        -         -  -     SO    ' 
Liver     ...          56    "      " 

Spleen        -         -  -     63    ' 
Blood     ...          17    "      " 

In  such  cases  the  nervous  structures  not  only 
remain  intaft  but  in  good  order,  and  all  the  ma- 
terials appropriated  for  the  emergency  are  so 
completely  restored,  on  the  return  to  normal 

9 


Messages  to  Mothers 


conditions,  that  in  the  end  one  is  none  the  worse 
for  having  been  so  situated. 

Dr.  Edward  Hooker  Dewey  of  Meadville, 
Pennsylvania,  resorts  to  fasting  as  a  means  of 
curing  his  patients.  He  reports  enough  cases  to 
demonstrate  that  fasting  is  a  safe  therapeutic 
means  when  administered  knowingly.  He  re- 
ports Miss  Kuenzel  of  Philadelphia  as  having 
fasted  forty-five  days  at  a  loss  of  twenty  pounds 
and  with  complete  restoration  from  a  serious 
illness  in  which  her  mind  was  involved  and  on 
which  account  she  was  taken  to  an  asylum 
where  she  did  not  improve.  This  was  in  1899. 
Miss  Kuenzel  was  a  refined  woman,  twenty-two 
years  of  age  and  weighed  one  hundred  and  forty 
pounds  at  the  start  and  one  hundred  and  twenty 
pounds  at  the  conclusion  of  her  forty-five  days' 
easy  fast  without  any  trouble  to  herself  or  any 
one  else.  She  took  no  drugs  and  there  was  noth- 
ing but  nature  to  which  credit  was  due  for 
recovery.  Credit  was  also  due  Dr.  Dewey  and 
the  friends  for  trusting  this  "  nature  of  the  ani- 
mal "  to  perform  this  restoration. 

Nothing  is  done  without  power,  and  in  this 
case  the  power  which  it  cost  to  restore  order  in 
the  body  of  this  patient  and  to  keep  all  her 
bodily  functions,  excepting  those  of  the  digestive 
apparatus,  in  a6lion,  was  represented  by  the 
twenty  pounds  of  fat  which  disappeared.  The 

10 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

average  daily  quantity  of  power  required  was 
represented  by  four-ninths,  or  less  than  half  a 
pound  of  fat.  The  patient  was  up  and  around, 
went  to  entertainments  and  took  long  walks,  a 
seven-mile  tramp  on  the  thirty-seventh  day. 

The  amount  of  power  that  some  men  and 
women  require  to  do  mental  work  per  day  is 
represented  by  the  amount  of  fat  per  day  which 
they  gain  in  weight  when  they  stop  work,  other- 
wise making  no  change.  This  daily  gain,  for  a 
week  or  two,  is  in  many  cases  a  pound.  This 
matter  is,  of  course,  generally  observed  only  in 
cases  of  persons  who  have  been  reduced  in  weight 
by  overtime  work.  The  power  which  a  hog  in 
the  pen  gets  from  its  food  is  stored  in  the  form 
of  fat,  because  there  is  nothing  for  the  hog  to  do 
by  which  it  could  pay  out  the  power.  In  1866  I 
saw  the  grass  getting  scarcer,  thinner  and  shorter 
as  we  moved  at  the  rate  of  a  hundred  miles  a 
week  westward  from  Omaha,  while  our  oxen, 
drawing  heavy  loads,  were  also  as  gradually  get- 
ting thinner.  The  grass  was  their  only  food  and 
must  have  been  far  from  being  sufficient  to  sup- 
ply the  power  that  drew  the  loads.  The  fat  of 
the  oxen  was  used  up  to  furnish  the  power. 

Power  is  required  for  self-control,  for  self-gov- 
ernment. "He  that  ruleth  himself  is  mightier 
than  he  that  taketh  a  city."  Not  much  power 
is  required  for  this  purpose;  self-control  does 

11 


Messages  to  Mothers 


not  make  one  tired,  does  not  exhaust  one's 
power,  but  it  requires  always  the  presence  of  a 
high  measure  of  power;  high  pressure,  the  steam 
engineer  would  call  it,  or  high  voltage,  the  elec- 
trician would  say.  Successful  self-governors  are 
strong  men  and  women.  Children  are,  and  some 
invalids  ought  to  be,  governed  by  parents  or 
guardians.  It  does  not  seem  to  require  much 
power  to  make  up  one's  mind,  or  to  come  to  a 
decision  or  conclusion;  but  this  seems  easy  only 
to  the  strong,  while  the  same  a6lion  seems  about 
impossible  to  those  who  are  powerless.  To  be 
short  of  physical  power  means  to  be  short  of 
mental  power.  For  much  that  children  and 
other  subordinates  do,  they  are  spared  the  trouble 
and  do  not  require  the  power  to  make  up  their 
minds;  their  parents  and  superiors  do  that  for 
them  and  only  the  action  is  left  to  be  fulfilled. 
To  this  extent  one  may  be  controlled  by  the 
mind  of  another.  That  a  thing  is  easy  to  do,  if 
you  only  make  up  your  mind,  is  true;  but  it  is 
harder  to  make  up  one's  mind  to  do  a  thing,  if 
he  is  weak  and  powerless,  than  it  is  to  do  the 
thing. 

An  hysterical  woman  is  simply  one  who  is 
powerless,  owing  to  digestive  disorder  or  over- 
time work,  and  her  self-control  is  not  easy  for 
the  further  reason  that  it  is  not  habitual.  She 
cries  or  laughs  automatically  when  there  is  provo- 

12 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

cation  to  that  effe6l.  It  requires  little  or  no 
power  to  laugh  or  cry,  but  it  requires  power  not 
to  laugh  and  especially  not  to  cry,  and  it  requires 
still  more  power  to  make  up  her  mind  not  to  cry 
or  to  stop  crying.  Of  course,  she  stops  crying  in 
time,  because  crying  occurs  in  self-limited  periods. 

It  sometimes  happens  that  nothing  can  be 
done  for  a  patient  because  there  is  no  guardian- 
ship. There  are  insubmissive  and  lone  men  and 
women,  sixty  years  of  age,  more  or  less,  with  af- 
fairs to  which  they  have  given  their  attention 
and  their  power  to  the  last  unit  of  their  storage 
batteries.  Now  they  are  weak  and  sick  and  have 
not  power  to  make  up  their  minds  to  resign  af- 
fairs wholly  or  partly  to  others.  Bodily  functions 
fail  for  want  of  power;  they  call  for  help,  but 
when  help  arrives  they  occupy  the  whole  time 
with  their  own  automatic  talk;  they  never  listen, 
never  understand,  never  succeed  in  grasping  the 
proffered  helping  idea.  A  child  would  not, 
either.  They  need  a  guardian.  One  such  person 
was  given  the  ominous  suggestion  to  wind  up 
his  business.  He  did  so,  expecting  Death  as  the 
next  comer.  But  power  being  released  from  busi- 
ness, it  became  available  for  bodily  functions; 
restoration  took  place  and  he  made  a  complete 
spontaneous  recovery. 

Talking  and  compulsory  listening  cost  much 
power;  either  one  alone  can  exhaust  the  power 

13 


Messages  to  Mothers 


of  a  person  to  the  point  of  prostration.  That 
such  prostration  is  called  "  nervous  prostration  " 
or  "nervous  exhaustion"  shows  the  state  of  the 
prevailing  misunderstanding  of  this  matter. 
People  seem  to  think  the  nerves  are  out  of 
order.  "It's  your  nerves,"  repeats  the  doctor  to 
the  patient,  and  no  wonder  he  fails  to  do  any 
good  for  her.  Power  has  not  been  taken  into 
reckoning.  If  the  electrician  did  not  take  power 
into  reckoning,  he  might  also  repeat,  when  your 
electrical  apparatus  failed  to  work,  "It's  the 
wires."  The  nerves  are  all  right;  I  doubt  that 
they  are  ever  out  of  working  order;  I  am  sure 
the  blame  is  misplaced.  The  nervous  system 
seems  to  be  self-repairing  and  self-maintaining, 
and  is  not  even  impaired  by  the  extreme  ex- 
haustion of  starvation.  The  subconscious  mind 
cares  for  the  nervous  system  and  preserves  it 
from  all  harm  except  that  of  poisons.  Wires 
may  get  out  of  order,  but  the  nerves,  I  believe, 
never;  it  is  the  power  which  operates  the  nerves 
that  fails. 

What  mind  is,  we  do  not  know;  we  know  to 
some  extent  what  it  does.  We  know  it  operates 
through  instrumentalities,  and  that  the  cells,  or 
groups  of  cells,  of  the  well-known  gray  nervous 
matter,  mostly  within  the  skull  but  much  of  it 
elsewhere  in  the  body,  are  the  instrumentalities. 
There  are  circumstances  enough  which  tend  to 

14 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

prove  that  mind  is  helpless  without  power  to 
operate  its  instrumentalities.  Whatever  the 
human  brain  may  achieve,  it  is  the  fuel  foods, 
chiefly  the  starches,  sugars  and  fats,  that  supply 
the  power  to  accomplish  the  achievement.  The 
same  power  might  otherwise  operate  a  pick  and 
shovel,  or  the  same  fuel  might  be  burned  in  a 
furnace  and  yield  power  to  run  a  machine,  or  a 
dynamo  and  produce  electricity.  Mind  should 
be  reckoned  as  including  all  that  intelligence 
within  us  that  governs  all  the  activities  of  every 
organ,  including  the  brain,  and  of  every  cell. 
We  are  conscious  of  some  mind  and  unconscious 
of  what  I  believe  to  be  the  greater  part  of  it. 

We  have  then  conscious  mind  and  we  have 
subconscious  mind,  which  we  often  refer  to  as 
nature,  "nature  of  the  animal,"  with  the  small 
initial  letter  to  distinguish  it  from  the  Universal 
Intelligence,  spoken  of  and  written  as  Nature 
with  the  capital  initial.  Mind  attends  to  volun- 
tary actions  of  the  body;  the  subconscious  mind 
attends  to  the  involuntary  functions  and  to  all 
organs  and  cells  of  the  body,  governing  and 
maintaining  each  organ  and  its  function  and 
keeping  them  all  in  coordinate  action.  Even  a 
faint  idea  of  what  is  going  on  in  the  body,  and 
the  coordinate  character  of  it  all,  must  give  us  a 
very  exalted  notion  of  the  subconscious  part  of 
our  minds. 

15 


Messages  to  Mothers 


The  subconscious  mind  does  much  more  than 
conduct  the  mere  animal  functions;  it  contrib- 
utes very  largely  to  the  mental  work  of  solving 
problems,  developing  inventions,  organizing  and 
formulating  arguments,  essays,  books,  musical 
compositions  and  so  on.  The  subconscious  mind 
originates  ideas  and  delivers  them  to  mind  like 
prepaid  parcels,  as  O.  W.  Holmes  said.  The  or- 
ganization and  growth  of  mental  untertakings, 
like  the  production  of  a  book,  go  on  much  un- 
consciously, and,  though  under  direction  of  mind, 
they  are  the  work  of  subconscious  mind  rather 
more  than  of  the  conscious. 

It  can  be  shown  that  the  work  of  the  subcon- 
scious mind  is  done  at  the  expense  of  power. 
Many  of  the  best  writers  have  been  ill  with  di- 
gestive disorders  coincidently  with  the  progress 
of  organization  and  growth  of  a  piece  of  work. 
While  the  time  they  spent  voluntarily  working 
at  their  tasks  may  not  have  been  excessive,  their 
attention  was  on  their  work  at  all  other  hours  of 
the  day  and  night.  Ideas  merged  into  conscious- 
ness at  off  times,  even  during  sleep,  causing  them 
to  awaken,  showing  that  organization  and  growth 
of  the  work  were  going  on  at  such  times  and  at 
all  times  until  the  work  was  complete  and  ready 
for  delivery  through  pen  on  paper.  At  all  times, 
then,  so  long  as  one  or  more  subjects  were  the 
objects  of  paramount  attention,  was  the  subcon- 

16 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

scious  mind  busy  and  using  power  for  the  or- 
ganization and  growth  of  the  new  intellectual 
structures,  and  the  more  complicated  the  organi- 
zation and  greater  the  structure,  the  more  power 
it  required. 

So  much  power,  indeed,  has  many  a  work  cost 
its  author,  that  in  sacrificing  what  was  necessary 
for  digestion,  protracted  illness  has  been  the 
result  because  not  enough  power  was  reserved 
for  the  maintenance  of  that  physical  integrity 
called  health.  We  may  say  truly  and  in  all  sin- 
cerity that  Thomas  Carlyle,  for  example,  suffered 
from  the  sickness  of  pregnancy.  He  never  wrote 
but  one  book  without  being  miserably  sick  before 
it  was  organized  and  completely  developed  and 
ready  for  commitment  to  paper.  This  sickness, 
we  will  take  more  pains  to  show,  was  due  to 
failure  of  the  digestive  functions,  because  power, 
that  was  present  and  available  for  digestion, 
was  diverted  to  the  work  of  organization  of  the 
book.  The  principles  are  just  the  same  when, 
as  in  the  case  of  pregnancy  as  ordinarily  under- 
stood, it  is  the  organization  and  growth  of  a 
fetus,  with  only  this  difference, — that  in  the  case 
of  a  book  the  whole  affair  is  largely  subject  to 
control  by  the  conscious  mind,  whereas  in  fetal 
pregnancy  the  conscious  mind  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  case,  as  we  shall  see  later. 

It  may  be   required  to  know  what  are  the 

17 


Messages  to  Mothers 


means  of  avoiding  this  sickness  of  mental  preg- 
nancy? I  should  say,  and  base  my  saying  on 
theory  confirmed  by  experience:  limit  your  vol- 
untary work  at  your  undertaking  to  a  short 
sitting  in  the  forenoon  and  afternoon,  or  to  fore- 
noon or  afternoon  only;  sit  only  so  long  as  you 
can  do  good  work,  and  no  longer;  rest  absolutely 
from  such  work  at  least  one  day  in  seven;  do 
not  work  on  the  subjects  nor  on  any  other  mental 
work  during  the  evening.  If  you  are  irritable, 
sleepless  and  dyspeptic  under  this  plan  which 
allows  the  subconscious  mind  to  continue  work 
between  sittings  and  at  all  other  times  of  day 
and  night  and  Sundays,  then  divert  your  atten- 
tion sometime  daily  to  some  other  occupation  or 
pastime  which  does  not  require  more  than  the 
simplest  mental  effort  and  only  the  least  power. 
This  will  interrupt  the  work  of  the  subconscious 
mind,  stop  its  appropriation  of  power  and  allow 
you  enough  power  for  bodily  functions  and  nor- 
mal maintenance.  Rest  from  voluntary  mental 
work  at  least  one  hour  after  each  meal  so  that 
your  digestive  apparatus  may  have  the  benefit 
of  all  your  might  for  digestion.  Do  not  watch 
the  clock  for  the  expiration  of  this  hour  of  rest 
after  each  meal,  rather  watch  your  feelings  for 
the  moment  when  power  becomes  available  for 
operating  the  brain. 

Since  it  is  true  that  each  one  can  do  his  own 

18 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

work  best  in  his  own  way,  let  these  instructions 
be  disregarded  and  work  as  you  please  so  far  as 
your  health  will  permit.  If  you  need  these  in- 
structions, but  think  their  adoption  involves  a 
waste  of  much  time  and  a  long  delay  of  the  end 
of  your  work,  remember  that  those  who  were 
sick  a  great  deal,  as  Darwin,  Carlyle  and  Herbert 
Spencer  were,  lost  a  great  deal  of  time  owing  to 
illness,  and,  even  when  well  enough  to  work, 
could  only  sit  a  short  while.  Spencer  worked 
one  to  two  hours  daily;  Darwin,  three  to  three 
and  a  quarter  hours  daily;  Carlyle  tried  to  work 
all  day  and  half  the  night,  seven  days  a  week, 
but,  of  course,  was  on  many  days  too  ill  to  work 
at  all.  These  statements  are  not  true  for  the  en- 
tire working  careers  of  Darwin  and  Spencer. 
Before  settling  down  to  these  limits  they  worked 
overtime  and  became  ill  and  their  ills  forced 
them  to  the  limits  mentioned.  It  must  be  re- 
membered, for  it  is  one  of  my  premises,  that  a 
unit  of  mental  energy  is  worth  at  least  two  and 
a  half  units  of  muscular  energy;  in  other  words, 
an  hour  of  original  mental  work  costs  as  much 
power  as  two  and  a  half  hours  of  hard  manual 
labor. 

The  sickness  of  fetal  pregnancy,  though  often 
very  distressing  and  sometimes  unnecessarily 
fatal,  is  a  simple  matter  and  can  now  be  ex- 
plained in  a  simple  way,  which  in  turn  leads  to 

19 


Messages  to  Mothers 


natural,  simple  and  easy  means  of  prevention 
and  cure  without  drugs.  Power,  the  part  it  per- 
forms in  the  case,  is  the  principal  thing  to  be 
considered  and  understood  in  the  premises. 
Every  constructive  process  of  matter  and  mind 
requires  power.  In  Nature  there  are  two  kinds 
of  constructive  processes:  one  is  growth  simply, 
the  other  is  organization,  and  the  two  are  always 
carried  on  in  the  same  structure  but  not  always 
at  the  same  time.  Power  is  indispensable  to  the 
organization  and  growth  of  every  plant  and 
every  animal  and  every  detail  of  the  same. 
Power  is  required  for  the  healing  or  restoration 
of  any  part  destroyed  or  injured. 

Organization  requires  more  power  than  mere 
growth.  The  hardest  and  most  fatiguing  part  of 
constructing  a  book,  a  plan,  or  any  mental  com- 
position, is  its  organization.  The  bird  does  not 
grow  in  the  egg,  it  is  only  organized  there.  The 
fat  of  the  egg  is  the  stored  power  which  is  em- 
ployed in  the  organization.  This  fat  is  in  the 
yolk  and,  in  the  case  of  the  hen's  egg,  is  equal 
to  half  the  weight  of  the  egg  minus  the  shell 
and  water.  Leaving  water  out  of  the  reckoning, 
the  fuel  material  is  by  weight  equal  to  the  ma- 
terial used  in  the  structure. 

The  caterpillar  accumulates  and  stores  ma- 
terial very  similar  to  the  yolk  of  the  hen's  egg, 
says  Professor  Woodworth,  entomologist.  This 

20 


Power  in  Physiological  Functions 

material  supplies  the  power  which  effects  its 
change  of  organization,  or  reorganization,  to  that 
of  the  butterfly.  This  is  a  great  change,  and  the 
relatively  great  loss  of  weight  by  the  time  the 
process  is  complete  indicates  what  a  large  share 
of  the  caterpillar's  own  material  has  disap- 
peared,— burned  up  to  furnish  power  for  the  re- 
organization. "  The  weight  of  the  emerging  but- 
terfly is  in  many  cases  not  one-tenth  that  of  the 
caterpillar,"  said  Professor  Joseph  Le  Conte.  In 
the  case  of  the  hen's  egg  there  must  be  a  similar 
loss  of  weight.  A  promised  determination  of  the 
amount  of  this  loss  has  up  to  the  last  moment 
failed  to  reach  me.  I  suggest,  at  any  rate,  that 
the  weight  of  the  newly  hatched  chick  will  be 
found  to  be  a  surprisingly  small  fraction  of  the 
weight  of  the  fresh-laid  egg,  the  loss  represent- 
ing the  fuel  that  supplied  the  power  that  effected 
the  organization  of  the  bird.  The  same  must  be 
true  for  every  egg  in  which  organization  takes 
place  outside  the  parent  body. 

It  happens  regularly  with  many  plants  and 
animals  that  an  extraordinary  amount  of  power 
is  needed  at  times  and  under  circumstances 
when  none  at  all  is  obtainable,  or  when  its  re- 
quirement can  only  be  supplied  in  part.  Under 
these  circumstances  the  power  is  stored  in  the 
tissues  in  the  form  of  fuel  material  ready  for  the 
emergency  when  that  arrives.  Thus  plants  store 

21 


Messages  to  Mothers 


fuel  as  well  as  building  material  for  use  during 
the  organization  and  growth  of  flowers,  fruits 
and  seeds.  While  most  plants  can  accumulate 
these  materials  fast  enough  to  produce  fruit  or 
seed  annually,  others  require  more  than  one 
year.  The  century  plant  is  said  to  require  from 
ten  to  seventy  years,  according  to  soil  and  climate, 
to  accumulate  the  large  quantity  of  starch  in  its 
great  thick  leaves  with  which  to  produce  its 
great  flower  stalk  and  its  enormous  crop  of 
flowers,  and  then  seeds,  for  which  purpose  it 
finally  gives  up  all  its  power,  even  that  vital 
power  called  life — 

"  For  it  blooms  but  once  and,  blooming,  it  dies." 

Migratory  birds  during  a  season  of  feeding 
store  fat  to  supply  the  power  that  is  to  carry 
them  on  their  flight  of  possibly  two  thousand 
miles,  during  which  they  are  to  have  neither 
food  nor  rest. 


22 


Chapter  II 

Sickness  of  Pregnancy 

Its  Cause  Revealed  and  Its 
Prevention  Explained 


IN  THE  case  of  fetal  organization,  develop- 
ment and  growth,  the  question  of  power  is 
paramount.  Her  food  is  the  woman's  source 
of  power  and  material  for  organization, 
growth  and  maintenance,  and  the  food  is  also 
the  source  of  power  used  for  any  work  or  play 
of  body  or  mind.  Generally  a  woman  in  a  good 
state  of  health  will  be  about  as  busy  as  she  is  able 
to  be,  whether  with  work  or  play  of  muscle  or 
brain,  or  both.  Even  if  time  is  given  to  company, 
it  keeps  her  brain  busy,  and  mental  effort  uses 
up  power  much  faster  and  more  of  it  than  hard 
labor  in  the  same  length  of  time.  She  eats  what 
and  all  she  feels  she  needs,  and  pays  out  power  in 
various  ways  all  she  feels  she  can,  and  that  is  all 
corre6l.  In  regard  to  the  various  objects  of  her 
attention — the  house,  the  children,  the  husband, 
the  relations,  the  dressmaker,  the  callers  she 
must  receive,  the  calls  she  must  make,  the  church 
and  its  various  auxiliaries,  the  reading  she  must 
do — they  are  of  such  character  that  she  is  not 
likely  to  leave  them  unattended  to,  nor  to  rele- 

23 


Messages  to  Mothers 


gate  them  to  some  one  else,  until  something 
happens  to  change  the  current  of  domestic 
events.  Her  routine  of  duties  is  established  and 
is  not  easily  alterable.  Her  routine  of  dietary 
subsistence  is  also  established  and  is  not  easily 
changed.  She  is  a  woman  of  "regular"  habits, 
perhaps,  and  while  she  has  all  due  respect  for 
the  law  of  change,  she  may  not  be  aware  to  what 
little  things  that  law  applies.  So  far,  however, 
she  is  perfectly  well,  which  proves  that  her  ways 
are  correct  so  far,  and  so  they  are. 

Let  us  suppose  that  the  lady's  efforts  have 
been  using  up  her  power  to  the  last  unit,  that 
now  the  stage  of  pregnancy  begins  and  there 
arises  at  once  the  additional  demand  for  power 
as  well  as  material  for  the  organization,  develop- 
ment and  growth  of  the  fetus.  The  perpetuation 
of  its  kind  is  above  all  things  the  paramount 
concern  of  the  animal.  It  is  not  strange  then 
that  we  find  the  fetus  to  be  the  paramount  con- 
cern of  the  subconscious  mind,  nature. 

This  nature  ( of  the  animal )  is  complex,  just 
as  the  conscious  mind  is;  it  has  faculties  just  as 
the  conscious  mind  has.  Thus  there  is  evidence 
of  the  presence  of  what  I  have  called  the  gastric 
intelligence,  a  detail  of  nature  that  we  have  op- 
portunities of  knowing  better  than  any  other 
subconscious  faculty.  We  cannot  know  what 
this  nature  is,  but  we  can  to  some  very  impor- 

24 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


tant  extent  know  what  it  does.  I  have  already 
alluded  to  this  intelligence  as  performing  what 
is  called  unconscious  cerebration;  we  must  give 
the  same  nature  credit  for  attending  so  perfectly 
well  to  all  the  functions  of  every  organ  and  cell 
in  the  body — when  not  interfered  with  by  con- 
scious mind.  Nature  governs  them  all  and  main- 
tains them  all  in  coordinate  aclion.  We,  the 
mind,  need  know  nothing  about  what  is  in  us, 
nor  what  is  going  on  in  us.  Mind,  with  its  al- 
ways incomplete  and  doubtful  knowledge  of  body 
and  mind,  cannot  even  take  any  initiative  toward 
assisting  nature  without  great  liability  to  do 
harm.  Mind  has  no  business  in  nature's  jurisdic- 
tion. This  nature  is  a  very  highly  developed  in- 
telligence and  an  infant  inherits  it  in  this  al- 
ready perfected  state. 

This  nature  is  not  amenable  to  improvement 
by  education  of  mind.  This  nature  under  natural 
conditions  does  not  mislead;  it  is  practically  in- 
errant,  as  Naturalist  John  Burroughs  said.  Mind, 
under  the  influence  of  learning,  does  mislead; 
especially  misleading  is  all  that  learning  per- 
taining to  the  needs  of  the  body  in  health  and 
disease  when  appropriated  by  those  who  are 
well.  That  learning  is  not  yet  elevated  to  the 
dignity  of  science  and  is  not  yet  generally  fit 
for  appropriation  in  the  sick-room.  In  cases 
of  functional  disease  the  greatest  results  of 

25 


Messages  to  Mothers 


benefit  to  the  patient  come  from  doing  nothing. 
This  is  from  observation  and  experience.  This 
is  what  the  "Christian  Science"  method  of  heal- 
ing amounts  to  and  is  the  method  that  amounts 
to  a  virtual  resignation  of  oneself  into  the  care 
of  his  own  great  subconscious  intelligence,  the 
capacity  of  which  for  healing  and  restoring  or- 
der out  of  disorder  has  not  yet  begun  to  be  un- 
derstood. It  does  not  need  to  be  understood  by 
animals  in  a  state  of  nature,  nor  by  children  that 
are  let  alone  in  their  selections  with  only  foods 
in  reach  that  are  natural  and  simple — not  un- 
duly mixed  nor  artificially  modified.  But  those 
who  are  immersed  in  the  pursuit  of  understand- 
ings cannot  afford  to  leave  an  understanding  of 
their  own  natures,  so  far  as  that  is  possible,  out 
of  consideration.  One  may  at  least  know  his 
own  nature  well  enough  to  trust  it. 

Nature  often  expresses  itself;  it  makes  selec- 
tions and  demands  which  the  untutored  mind, 
with  nothing  artificial  in  reach,  would  make  no 
mistake  in  interpreting.  Nature  can  be  trusted 
to  make  no  mistake  in  the  selection  of  foods.  A 
child,  even  a  baby,  will  make  no  mistake  in  selec- 
tion, but  the  tutored  conscious  intelligence,  that 
assumes  to  do  selection  for  it,  will  and  does  make 
serious  mistakes  and  repeats  them  a  thousand 
times  over.  Here  was  a  case  in  which  mind  and 
nature  in  the  same  person  were  at  variance  one 

26 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


evening  on  a  question  of  selection;  twenty-four 
hours  later  they  disagreed  again  on  the  same 
point,  but  had  in  the  meantime  changed  sides  in 
relation  thereto.  There  was  here  a  longing  for 
corned  beef  and  cabbage  so  dominant  as  to  com- 
pel a  chronic  dyspeptic  to  call  for  and  eat  it.  On 
the  other  hand,  his  conscious  mind  strongly  but 
vainly  remonstrated,  and  he  fully  believed  he 
was  doing  wrong  and  that  he  would  surely  suffer 
for  eating  the  combination,  and  so  he  ate  it  with 
fear  of  the  results.  Then  he  was  surprised  and 
delighted  to  find  that  he  did  not  suffer  at  all; 
not  even  the  expectation  of  suffering  had  been 
competent  to  bring  it  on.  Having  found  that  he 
could  digest  corned  beef  and  cabbage  and  re- 
gretting that  he  ate  it  with  fear  when  he  might 
just  as  well  have  enjoyed  it,  the  man  decided  to 
go  to  the  same  place  twenty-four  hours  later  and 
have  corned  beef  and  cabbage  again  and  enjoy  it. 
First  it  was  the  subconscious  mind  that  made  the 
selection,  the  conscious  mind  dissenting;  twenty- 
four  hours  later  it  was  the  conscious  mind  that 
made  the  choice,  the  subconscious  was  not  yet 
heard  from.  The  combination  was  again  called 
for,  consumed,  enjoyed  without  fear,  rather  with 
the  pleasing  consciousness  of  the  demonstrated 
fact  that  it  agreed  with  his  stomach.  "  It  agreed  " 
is  not  correct;  corned  beef  and  cabbage,  cooked, 
must  be  dead  and  cannot  be  supposed  to  have 

27 


Messages  to  Mothers 


living  intelligence  to  agree  or  disagree;  but  the 
stomach  has  the  intelligence  and  can  agree  or 
disagree  on  the  choice  made  by  the  conscious 
mind.  The  gastric  intelligence  did  not  agree  on 
the  choice  of  corned  beef  and  cabbage  a  second 
time  in  twenty-four  hours.  The  stomach  struck, 
did  nothing  with  the  mess,  so  it  was  left  to  decay 
in  the  stomach  and  serve  as  the  cause  of  such  a 
bad  night  that  the  man  when  met  five  years 
later  had  not  again  eaten  corned  beef  and  cab- 
bage. There  are  plenty  of  other  and  similar  ex- 
amples, and  the  reader  is  very  likely  to  know  of 
several  of  the  kind. 

Illiterate  people,  not  having  the  advantages 
of  learning,  have  also  not  its  disadvantages; 
they  are  not  misguided  by  it;  being  governed 
more  by  inerrant  nature,  they  have  better  luck 
in  matters  of  health  of  themselves  and  children. 
I  speak  of  misappropriation  of  learning  and  of 
being  misguided  by  learning;  I  mean  that  when 
one  is  well  he  should  not  allow  himself  to  make 
any  change  in  the  care  of  himself,  or  in  his  diet, 
as  a  result  of  what  he  reads,  or  what  "  they  say." 
He  should  not  be  influenced  into  making  any 
change  in  his  selection  by  any  alleged  ease  or 
difficulty  of  digestion,  nor  by  the  relative  nu- 
tritive values  of  food  materials,  nor  by  the 
alleged  fitness  of  special  foods  for  special  pur- 
poses. Mothers  who  happen  to  have  sick  chil- 

28 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


dren  have  been  alluded  to  as  ignorant  in  regard 
to  matters  of  health,  diet  and  disease.  Ignorant 
is  not  the  proper  word;  even  if  the  mother  is 
absolutely  illiterate,  she  has  her  subconscious 
mind  and  a  natural  wisdom  sufficient  unto  all 
that  she  is  constituted  and  therefore  designed  to 
perform.  She  succeeds  in  raising  children  and 
must  certainly  be  given  credit  for  knowing  how. 
It  is  only  of  the  artificial  and  conventional  sym- 
bols and  formulas  by  which  natural  knowledge 
is  expressed  and  communicated  that  she  is  ig- 
norant. 

The  welfare  of  the  fetus  is  of  the  same  kind 
of  paramount  importance  as  the  life  of  the  race; 
accordingly  we  find  the  subconscious  mind  un- 
compromising in  its  attention  to  it.  The  mind 
now  has  no  chance  to  contest  any  point  in  regard 
to  the  fetus.  I  write  with  reference  always  to 
that  standard  of  woman  who  holds  firmly  to 
what  her  subconscious  mind  indicates  as  right. 
The  fetus  is  the  subconscious  mind's  prime  ob- 
je6l  of  solicitude  now.  From  the  moment  that 
life  is  kindled  in  the  ovule  the  subconscious 
mind  will  see  to  it  that  material  and  power  are 
supplied  for  its  organization  and  growth  even  if 
material  and  power  fail  for  other  purposes  of 
body  and  mind.  The  demands  of  the  subcon- 
scious mind  for  the  fetus  are  to  be  constant  day 
and  night  for  nine  months,  and  during  the  first 

29 


Messages  to  Mothers 


three  months,  more  or  less,  the  demand  for  power 
is  extraordinary,  because  during  the  first  three 
months  organization  takes  place. 

Sickness  of  pregnancy  affec~ls  mostly  the 
women  who  employ  their  minds,  and  its  severity 
is  proportional  to  the  amount  of  power  paid  out 
in  the  form  of  mental  effort.  The  educated,  the 
thinking,  the  reading,  the  talking  women,  are 
the  ones  most  likely  to  suffer.  This  includes  also 
the  woman  whose  work,  like  housework  and  care 
of  children,  is  a  matter  of  too  much  anxiety  and 
thought  to  her.  It  includes  also  the  little  woman 
who  manages  a  big  house  and  is  doing  a  big 
woman's  work.  She  is  a  little  instrument  apply- 
ing herself  to  a  big  undertaking.  The  speedy 
woman  is  pretty  sure  to  come  in  for  a  share  of 
this  sickness  because  she  is  speedy  and  pays  out 
power  unduly  fast  and  soon  exhausts  her  supply. 
That  is  why  she  is  thin;  she  keeps  her  storage 
battery  of  fat  burned  low,  or  so  promptly  pays 
out  all  power  derived  from  her  food  that  none 
of  it  can  be  stored  as  fat.  Power  varies  as  the 
square  of  the  speed;  if  the  speed  be  doubled, 
the  cost  of  power  will  be  fourfold;  if  the  speed 
be  increased  threefold,  the  cost  of  power  will 
then  be  ninefold  in  any  given  time. 

Sickness  of  pregnancy,  then,  is  one  of  the  evils 
that  have  come  with,  or  have  been  augmented 
by,  learning,  which  has  possessed  women  with 

30 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


more  to  think  of  and  more  to  care  for,  demand- 
ing of  them  to  pay  out  so  much  power  that  in 
many  cases  their  bodies  are  ill-maintained  and 
their  health  is  defective  in  comparison  with 
those  who  use  their  brains  less  and  reserve  their 
power  rather  for  their  personal  maintenance  and 
duties  of  a  more  natural  and  domestic  character. 
The  lady  finding  herself  pregnant  will  gen- 
erally make  no  reduction  of  her  efforts,  of  her 
expenditure  of  power.  She  will  carry  on  her 
usual  duties,  and  her  subconscious  mind  will 
give  the  fetus  all  the  power  it  needs,  and  it  needs 
a  great  deal  day  and  night  for  the  first  three 
months.  The  quantity  of  food  not  having  been 
increased,  the  supply  of  power  remaining  as  be- 
fore, there  is  not  enough  to  keep  up  the  usual 
work  and  supply  the  fetus  also.  The  fetus  is 
first  served,  whatever  happens,  and  the  mind, 
erroneously  and  contrary  to  feeling  expressed 
by  subconscious  mind,  continues  to  direct  that 
all  the  work  of  muscle  and  brain  continue  as 
usual.  But  there  is  not  power  enough  for  all 
this,  so  the  shortage  must  fall  somewhere, — some 
function  must  fail.  Two  things  happen  now 
simultaneously:  functions  of  brain  and  stomach 
fail  and  disorder  and  suffering  begin.  The  mind 
of  the  patient  does  not  understand  this  matter; 
her  subconscious  mind  does  understand  it,  as 
will  appear  from  what  she  will  now  be  com- 

31 


Messages  to  Mothers 


pelled  to  do  by  way  of  emergency  treatment  en- 
tirely regardless  of  any  conscious  wishes  or  wis- 
dom. 

The  subconscious  mind  applies  a  partial  rem- 
edy for  the  brain's  deficiency  of  fuel  by  increas- 
ing at  intervals  the  pressure  of  blood  in  the 
brain.  Nausea  is  the  sensation  one  feels  when 
the  brain  is  in  a  short  time  affected  by  poverty 
or  deficiency  of  blood.  If  one  lies  down  without 
a  pillow,  blood  pressure  in  the  brain  is  increased 
and  the  patient  feels  less  nausea,  or  none  at  all, 
showing  that  the  recumbent  position  without  a 
pillow  is  a  proper  detail  of  treatment.  If  the 
patient  does  not  lie  down,  or  if  lying  down  does 
not  relieve  the  nausea,  the  subconscious  mind 
will  compel  the  patient  to  perform  and  repeat 
the  a6l  of  retching  in  spite  of  the  mind  of  the 
patient  or  of  her  physician.  This  is  the  subcon- 
scious mind's  way  of  increasing  blood  pressure  in 
the  brain  and  making  conditions  as  favorable  as 
possible  for  the  brain  to  get  a  better  supply  of 
fuel  material.  In  retching,  the  contents  of  the 
chest  and  abdominal  cavities  are  so  squeezed  as  to 
force  upward  some  of  the  blood  contained  in 
their  vessels.  This  is  not  vomiting,  and  is  just  as 
likely  to  take  place  when  the  stomach  is  empty. 
When  there  is  material  in  the  stomach  and  it 
happens  to  be  squeezed  up  this  will  not  be  essen- 
tial but  only  incidental  to  the  process,  because 

32 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


there  is  nothing  to  prevent  it.  The  stomach  has 
nothing  to  do  with  retching  except  to  be  passively 
implicated  in  a  purely  incidental  way. 

Sometimes  the  failure  of  the  brain,  owing  to 
shortage  of  fuel,  is  rather  sudden  and  we  see  to 
some  extent  just  what  it  fails  in.  We  see  that 
it  fails  to  maintain  consciousness,  as  a  result  of 
which  all  that  depends  upon  consciousness  fails 
also.  The  subconscious  mind  warns  the  patient 
to  lie  down,  but  it  is  so  much  the  fashion  to  try 
to  weather  through  an  unpleasantness  and  not 
give  in  and  be  the  subject  of  a  sensation.  The 
premonitory  feeling  is  disregarded,  or  the  cir- 
cumstances may  not  permit  lying  down;  the  pa- 
tient falls  unconscious.  The  recumbent  position 
into  which  the  subconscious  mind  puts  the  pa- 
tient is  the  temporary  emergency  treatment,  and 
soon  consciousness  is  regained,  because  in  this 
position  gravity  increases  blood  pressure  in  the 
brain  as  compared  with  the  upright  position  in 
which  gravity  diminishes  it.  This  scene  is  of 
common  occurrence  in  church  at  early  morning 
services  to  which  it  is  customary  to  go  before 
eating. 

Poverty  of  blood  in  respect  of  nutritive  ma- 
terial, especially  fuel  or  power  material,  is  in 
these  cases  the  cause  of  nausea.  The  subcon- 
scious mind's  plan  of  retching  is  temporary  and 
merely  for  the  emergency;  something  worse 

33 


Messages  to  Mothers 


might  happen  if  the  subconscious  did  not  so 
increase  blood  pressure  in  the  brain.  The  real 
remedy  consists  in  supplying  nutritive  material, 
eating.  Eating  may  seem  out  of  the  question; 
the  thought  of  food  may  be  repugnant;  the 
sense  of  hunger  is  present  but  is  obscured  by  the 
ugly  sensations  of  the  illness;  the  patient,  how- 
ever, will  soon  feel  the  better  for  eating  and  will 
thus  be  convinced  that  eating  is  the  proper  thing 
under  the  circumstances.  What  shall  the  patient 
eat  ?  That  cannot  be  prescribed,  because  no  one 
can  seledl  for  her,  not  even  her  own  mind  can 
selecT:.  Diet  learning,  such  as  it  is,  is  ridiculously 
out  of  place  in  the  sick-room;  it  not  only  fails 
in  the  sick-room  and  in  the  hospital,  but  it  kills 
many  a  patient — this  selection  of  one  mind  for 
the  stomach  of  another — in  proof  of  which  there 
is  much  evidence  that  is  only  now  beginning  to 
receive  attention,  and  more,  I  think,  from  the 
popular  mind  than  from  the  medical  profession. 
The  subconscious  mind  of  the  patient  must  make 
the  selection  always.  Let  the  patient  disregard 
all  learning  on  matters  of  diet,  on  the  relative 
nutritive  values  and  the  relative  ease  or  difficulty 
of  digestion  of  things,  and  give  attention  to 
feeling,  which  is  the  language  of  her  subcon- 
scious mind.  The  only  care  then  remaining  is  to 
make  no  mistake  in  the  interpretation  of  the 
feelings.  The  subconscious  mind  knows  nothing 

34 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


that  is  unnatural ;  it  neither  knows  nor  calls  for 
artificial  conglomerations.  If,  for  example,  one 
longs  for  something  sweet,  let  her  look  at  dates, 
raisins,  figs  or  any  other  sweet  fruit,  fresh  or  in 
a  good  natural  state  of  preservation,  and  take 
what  she  feels  she  wants.  To  conclude  that  the 
subconscious  mind  calls  for  candy  is  to  misinter- 
pret the  call,  yet  the  simpler  candies  are  likely 
to  serve  one's  purpose  very  well,  such  as  nut 
candy  and  molasses  candy;  these  are  very  nearly 
natural.  Of  the  sweet  fruits,  the  best  for  any 
person  are  those  which  that  person  likes  best  and 
can  most  frequently  eat.  There  are  two  varieties 
of  dates  in  the  market,  the  golden  date  and  the 
Fard  date.  Dates  are  found  to  be  in  the  most 
constant  demand  by  the  greatest  number  of 
persons  for  the  greatest  length  of  time,  and 
are,  therefore,  the  best  sweet  fruit  available. 
Sweet  fruits  are  natural  objects  of  natural  de- 
mands; candy  is  not  the  object,  it  is  artificial, 
the  primitive  woman  did  not  have  candy.  On 
the  selection  of  foods  during  this  illness  more 
will  be  said  later. 

We  will  next  consider  the  cessation  of  work 
by  the  stomach  because  power  has  failed.  Action 
of  the  stomach  simply  stops;  not  even  the  gastric 
juice  is  supplied,  for  it  requires  power  to  supply 
that  also.  The  gastric  juice  is  among  other 
things  the  sterilizing  agent;  when  it  is  not  sup- 

35 


Messages  to  Mothers 


plied  the  food  must  undergo  decomposition  and, 
if  it  does  undergo  such  change,  a  whole  string  of 
distressing  evils  will  follow,  such  as  only  a 
chronic  dyspeptic  knows  of.  Here  the  subcon- 
scious mind  comes  to  the  rescue  again;  it  causes 
the  entire  mess  to  be  sent  up  as  a  lesser  evil 
than  what  must  otherwise  follow.  This  is  vom- 
iting and  is  done  by  design,  but  it  is  the  subcon- 
scious mind's  business,  and  in  such  emergencies 
this  has  its  way.  When  it  appears  that  the  proc- 
ess of  sending  material  up  from  the  stomach  is 
difficult,  when  repeated  attempts  are  made  with 
much  distress  and  poor  success,  it  is  likely  that 
the  content  of  the  stomach  is  too  nearly  solid, 
not  liquid  enough  to  float  up  easily.  One,  two 
or  three  cups  of  very  warm  water  should  then 
be  taken,  which  is  promptly  used  by  the  stomach 
as  a  carrier.  The  stomach  never  sends  up  water 
except  as  a  means  of  floating  up  other  material. 
The  stomach  having  been  emptied  and  the  food 
having  failed  to  serve  as  a  source  of  material 
and  power,  the  subconscious  mind  has  recourse 
to  the  woman's  fat  for  power  and  her  other 
structures  for  material  with  which  to  build  the 
fetus.  The  fetus  does  not  in  any  known  respect 
suffer  in  this  affair,  but,  of  course,  there  is  a 
limit  beyond  which  this  rejection  of  food  cannot 
go  without  danger  to  the  life  of  the  woman  and 
of  the  fetus  also. 

36 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


In  the  prevailing  professional  practice  there  is 
danger,  some  deaths  do  occur,  but  only  as  a  result 
of  the  practice.  The  cause  and  nature  of  the 
illness  not  being  understood,  the  treatment  is 
rather  more  likely  to  do  harm  than  good;  I 
have  not  known  it  to  do  any  good.  A  successful 
and  absolutely  safe  method  of  treatment,  briefly 
stated,  would  consist  of  doing  absolutely  noth- 
ing for  the  patient.  Being  left  to  the  guidance 
of  her  own  feelings,  her  own  subconscious  mind, 
she  would  do  about  the  right  things  and  get 
along  well.  Let  the  patient  alone,  relieve  her  of 
duties,  of  company,  of  advisers;  attend  to  her 
wants  as  she  feels  them.  From  that  moment  her 
condition  improves  and  in  a  day  or  two  she  is 
pretty  well  and  will  get  on  satisfactorily  if  only 
she  is  not,  by  what  she  reads  or  what  "they 
say,"  induced  to  return  to  the  erroneous  ways 
the  moment  she  is  again  comfortable. 

So  much,  so  persistently  and  so  fast  is  power 
appropriated  for  the  organization  and  growth  of 
the  fetus,  that  the  fuel  material  of  the  last  meal 
is  exhausted  before  the  next  meal  is  taken,  which 
is  most  likely  to  happen  during  the  longest  in- 
terval between  meals,  as  between  the  evening 
and  next  morning.  The  patient  no  sooner  gets 
out  of  bed  on  to  her  feet  than  she  is  sick;  she 
may  even  feel  sick  before  she  gets  up;  it  is  com- 
mon to  be  awakened  by  the  sensation  of  nausea 

37 


Messages  to  Mothers 


as  early  as  two  o'clock  in  the  morning.  Eating 
is  the  remedy  for  the  emergency;  but  it  is  bet- 
ter to  prevent  these  emergencies.  To  do  so  means 
eating  at  bedtime  and  eating  before  rising  in  the 
morning,  having  breakfast  in  bed.  There  should 
be  as  little  delay  as  possible  in  getting  some- 
thing to  eat  when  nausea  is  present  or  felt  to  be 
coming.  Nausea  in  these  cases  when  the  stomach 
is  empty  is  to  be  interpreted  as  an  urgent  sense 
of  hunger.  After  breakfast  in  bed  let  the  patient 
remain  in  bed  in  undisturbed  peace  thirty  to 
sixty  minutes;  let  the  feelings  be  watched  in- 
stead of  the  clock;  let  the  patient  get  up  when 
she  feels  like  doing  so. 

As  a  matter  of  precaution  let  there  be  within 
reach,  so  as  to  be  got  without  raising  the  head, 
a  few  edibles  that  can  be  resorted  to  in  case  sick- 
ness is  felt  very  early  in  the  morning.  What 
these  edibles  are  to  be,  is  to  be  determined  by 
each  patient  for  herself.  She  should  not  act  on, 
even  if  she  listens  to,  what  others  say.  She 
should  not  even  waste  power  listening;  what 
was  good  for  them  may  not  be  good  for  her. 
Other  minds  with  their  learning  cannot  influ- 
ence or  govern  her  bodily  functions;  she  has  her 
own  subconscious  mind  which  will  mind  its  own 
business  all  the  better  when  let  alone.  The 
bodily  functions  are  exclusively  under  the  juris- 
diction of  the  subconscious  mind  which  expresses 

38 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


its  needs  by  feelings  that  merge  into  conscious- 
ness. Let  the  patient  consider  these  exclusively 
in  making  her  food  selections.  A  combination 
of  illness,  anxiety  and  hunger  puts  the  patient 
in  a  condition  to  appreciate  the  help  of  so  much 
as  a  suggestive  list  exhibiting  many  materials 
from  which  she  is  to  select  the  few  she  wants. 
Such  list,  in  the  fashion  of  a  bill  of  fare,  will 
help  much,  and  it  should  be  made  without  worry- 
ing the  patient  so  much  as  to  consult  her  about 
its  making;  but  when  made  she  must  read  it, 
or  have  it  read  to  her,  for  the  purpose  of  select- 
ing what  is  likely  to  be  wanted  within  reach 
during  the  night  or  early  morning  or  between 
meals. 

This  list  should  include  everything  that  can 
be  made  available,  ready  to  eat  and  that  is  good. 
A  foodstuff  is  proven  to  be  good  by  the  fact 
that  it  has  been  and  is  much  and  often  used  by 
many.  While  this  suggested  list  is  to  be  made 
by  or  for  each  patient  according  to  circumstances 
of  availability  and  season,  I  suggest  that  among 
other  things  it  contain  so  far  as  practicable  the 
following:  — 

Almonds,  English  walnuts,  Brazil  nuts  and  filberts  (un- 
bleached nuts  are  in  the  better  state  of  preservation  ) . 
Raisins,  the  best  clusters. 
Dates,  both  varieties. 
Figs,  best  dried,  when  fresh  figs  are  unavailable. 

39 


Messages  to  Mothers 


Pop-corn,  prepared  at  home,  unmixed  with  other  matters. 
Olives,  pickled ;   some  ripe,  some  green. 
Onions,  some  fresh,  some  pickled. 
Beef,  dried;   cooked  or  not  cooked. 
Fish,  dried;   cooked  or  not  cooked. 
Crackers,  plainest  fresh,  in  variety. 
Biscuits,  cold;   no  objection  to  hot. 

Rice,  plain  boiled,  cold  or  hot.    (  Mixed  with  a  little  pure 
olive-oil  and  a  shake  of  salt,  even  cold  rice  is  very  fine.) 
Fruits,  fresh,  raw  or  stewed  (without  sugar  ) . 
Fruits,  dried,  freshly  stewed  (  without  sugar  ) . 

Whatever  alleged  outlandish  thing  the  gastric 
intelligence  may  demand,  it  will  be  right  to  eat 
it.  Besides  the  likelihood  of  having  to  eat  at 
bedtime  and  very  early  in  the  morning,  it  may 
be  necessary  to  eat  during  the  forenoon  and  af- 
ternoon. 

Good  drainage  of  the  body  will  contribute 
largely  to  good  physical  maintenance.  The  pa- 
tient should  not  go  thirsty.  Besides  the  fluids 
that  go  with  the  meals,  hot  water  should  gener- 
ally be  taken  about  four  times  daily.  The  best 
temperature  of  a  hot  drink  is  that  which  best 
suits  the  patient.  On  a  hot  day  one  can  drink 
cool  water  enough  for  drainage  purposes,  but  on 
cool  and  cold  days  experience  very  much  favors 
the  hot-water  beverage.  When  one  is  eating 
three  times  a  day  the  best  times  for  hot  water 
will  be  an  hour  to  an  hour  and  a  half  before  each 
meal  and  just  enough  to  quench  thirst  at  bed- 

40 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


time.  Two  glasses  of  hot  water  is  a  small  quan- 
tity to  take  at  one  sitting.  Any  adult  can  easily 
take  five  glasses  in  ten  minutes  and  ten  glasses 
in  thirty  minutes.  Such  quantities  are  sometimes 
taken  necessarily,  with  much  good  and  no  harm 
as  the  result,  but  this  is  only  mentioned  with  a 
view  to  showing  that  two  glasses  constitute  only 
a  moderate  quantity  of  hot  water  to  take  at  one 
sitting. 

One's  conscious  mind  may  take  undue  advan- 
tage of  the  subconscious  mind;  it  often  does; 
the  subconscious  through  feeling  pointing  one 
way,  the  conscious  through  reason,  example  or 
other  motive,  leading  to  diametrically  opposite 
ways.  The  subconscious  mind  often  gives  way, 
not  without  protest,  however,  allowing  prece- 
dence to  mind  in  many  cases  in  which  the  two  are 
at  variance.  By  the  time  we  have  lived  long 
enough,  those  of  us  who  work  will  have  noticed 
many  times  that  we  like  to  have  our  meals  in 
peace.  We  will  have  had  occasion  to  notice  also, 
as  Shakespeare  did,  that  "unquiet  meals  make 
ill  digestions."  Still  more  strongly  do  our  feel- 
ings prompt  us  to  rest  from  bodily  effort  and 
especially  from  mental  effort  a  while  after  meals. 
Animals  rest  after  eating,  so  do  all  peoples  of  all 
nations,  excepting  the  vi6lim  of  master  and  cir- 
cumstance in  the  city;  but  often  we  allow  our- 
selves to  be  lead  into  disregarding  these  feelings 

41 


Messages  to  Mothers 


by  which  our  subconscious  mind  would  direct  us, 
and  into  disregarding  the  universal  custom  of 
resting  an  hour  at  noon.  We  sit  still  enough 
bodily  at  our  meals,  but  vigorous  talking,  read- 
ing or  any  other  volitional  mental  effort  pro- 
longed throughout  the  sitting  costs  power.  The 
pregnant  woman  cannot  spare  this  power  be- 
cause it  is  all  needed  for  digestion.  She  should 
not  talk  at  all  at  meal-times  after  she  begins 
eating  nor  for  an  hour  afterwards.  I  know  that 
is  hard  for  a  woman  not  to  do,  and  she  may 
need  help  for  the  purpose,  some  one  with 
authority  to  say:  You  are  not  giving  your 
stomach  a  fair  chance,  or  "  unquiet  meals  make 
ill  digestions,"  and  this  may  prove  more  effective 
if  the  monitor  does  not  forget  to  mention  that 
Shakespeare  said  so. 

No  matter  how  weak  and  delicate  a  patient 
may  be,  there  will  be  power  enough  present, 
ready  and  available  for  digestion  of  anything 
she  may  really  need;  but  the  mind  can  cause 
the  diversion  of  that  power,  during  meals  and 
the  hour  after  eating,  to  effort  of  mind  and 
body  for  which  the  stomach's  allotment  of 
power  is  appropriated.  The  little,  busy,  speedy, 
thin  woman  will,  by  rapid  talk  during  meals 
and  a  bustle  of  business  directly  after  eating, 
use  up  all  the  power  present  and  available  for 
digestion,  so  that  the  stomach  is  helpless,  cannot 

42 


Sickness  of  Pregnancy 


even  supply  the  gastric  juice  to  save  the  mess 
from  rotting.  Good  thing,  then,  and  very  neces- 
sary, that  the  gastric  intelligence  should  order  it 
up.  Nothing  wrong  with  the  works,  only  the 
power  is  switched  off.  The  treatment  of  the 
case  when  a  meal  has  been  thrown  up  consists 
of  lying  down,  head  low,  no  volitional  mental 
effort  as  in  talking,  listening  or  reading.  Then 
in  two  to  five  minutes  the  patient  will  feel  like 
eating  again,  which  will  be  the  proper  thing 
to  do. 

To  prevent  this  action  of  the  stomach  in 
general,  the  patient  must  reduce  her  expenditure 
of  power.  It  is  quite  likely  that  it  will  be 
enough  to  eliminate  the  mental  effort  of  read- 
ing, talking  and  listening;  that  much  will  help 
immensely  and  may  be  enough.  If  not  enough, 
then  the  patient  must  eliminate  that  work  which 
entails  mental  effort  and  anxiety,  such  as  skilled 
work.  Specifically,  she  should  not  read  anything, 
should  neither  make  nor  receive  calls,  should  do 
nothing  that  can  be  left  undone  or  for  others  to 
do.  It  is  of  the  utmost  importance  to  have  meals 
in  peace  and  quiet,  and  rest  from  work,  especially 
mental  work,  at  least  one  hour  after  each  meal, 
and  during  that  hour  she  should  not  even  be 
spoken  to. 

The  patient  may  succeed  very  well  by  carry- 
ing out  these  instructions  only  halfway;  she 

43 


Messages  to  Mothers 


may  find  herself  an  easy  case;  if  so,  so  much 
the  better.  Certainly  a  woman  will  not  do  all 
these  things  unless  forced  by  illness  to  do  them. 
However,  it  is  my  duty  to  supply  the  maximum 
possible  requirement;  let  each  one  help  herself 
to  what  she  needs.  There  is  no  reason  for 
restraint  from  those  pastimes  which  afford 
pleasure  without  drawing  more  than  very  lightly 
upon  the  patient's  power. 

Sickness  of  pregnancy  affec"ls  chiefly  and  most 
severely  those  who  most  employ  their  minds; 
accordingly,  educated  women  come  in  for  a  large 
share  of  it  for  the  reasons  explained.  The  illiter- 
ate woman  who  does  skilled  labor  will  also  suffer, 
and,  I  am  told,  they  do  in  Japan  where  women 
not  only  work  but  work  somewhat  speedily  and 
put  skill  and  art  into  about  everything  they  do. 
Among  negro  women  in  the  South  this  sickness 
is  scarcely  heard  of.  Among  illiterate  women 
whom  I  have  known,  there  seems  to  have  been 
none  of  it.  Unskilled  hard  labor  is  not  unfavora- 
ble to  the  health  of  the  pregnant  woman;  it 
really  costs  little  power  even  if  it  does  require 
strong  instrumentalities. 


44 


Chapter  III 

Natural  Infant  Feeding 

The  Reason  Why  It  Fails  and  the 
Way  It  Will  Succeed 


NOTHING  short  of  disabling  misfor- 
tune or  a6tual  disease  should  be  al- 
lowed by  any  mother  to  excuse  her 
from  feeding  her  infant  in  the  one  and 
only  natural,  safe  and  best  way.  The  Great  In- 
finite Intelligence  has  provided  this  one  way  of 
feeding  the  infant.  The  little  finite  human 
mind,  influenced  and  aided  by  its  higher  educa- 
tion, is  miserably  failing  in  its  attempts  to  de- 
vise and  supply  substitute  schemes  for  Nature's 
one  prescribed  method.  Admitting  that  the  sub- 
stitute schemes  often  end  well,  who  can  say  that 
the  natural  way  would  not  have  ended  better? 
Who  can  say  at  what  age  of  later  life  the  right 
and  the  wrong,  the  better  and  the  worse,  the 
natural  and  the  artificial,  of  infant  care  ceases 
to  exert  any  influence  in  favor  of  good  or  evil, 
health  or  disease,  strength  or  weakness,  success 
or  failure  ?  At  any  rate,  it  is  the  known  evil  re- 
sults of  the  substitution  of  the  artificial  for  the 
natural  that  must  influence  us  to  abide  by  the 
natural  way  of  infant  feeding.  "  Statistics  from 

45 


Messages  to  Mothers 


America  and  Europe  show  that  in  all  large  cities 
infant  mortality  has  been  steadily  increasing  for 
the  past  twenty-five  years,"  wrote  Dr.  L.  Em- 
mett  Holt  in  1898,  and  he  blames  artificial  feed- 
ing more  than  all  other  alleged  causes.  In  Holt's 
experience  it  has  been  exceedingly  rare  to  find  a 
healthy  child  who  has  been  reared  in  a  tenement 
house  and  who  has  been  artificially  fed  from 
birth.  He  also  observes  that  while  among  the 
poor  the  capacity  for  maternal  nursing  seems  to 
be  diminishing  year  by  year,  among  the  better 
classes  it  has  come  to  be  the  exception  and  not 
the  rule.  In  Holt's  private  practice  not  one-third 
of  the  mothers  have  been  able,  though  willing, 
to  nurse  their  infants.  The  greatest  number  of 
deaths  during  the  first  year  of  life  among  rich 
and  poor  alike  are  caused  by  digestive  disorders 
that  are  due,  says  Holt,  to  artificial  feeding. 

No  source  of  a  married  woman's  happiness  is 
so  prolific  as  the  group  of  all-round  good  boys 
and  girls  that  she  is  raising.  Whether  this  group 
is  only  in  prospe6l,  or  is  present,  or  has  scattered, 
each  to  where  he  or  she  can  best  thrive,  is  there 
any  other  sphere  or  any  other  purpose,  to  which 
a  married  woman  can  devote  the  best  attention 
and  effort  of  her  life,  that  will  be  productive  of 
so  much  pleasure  of  such  supreme  quality  for  so 
great  a  length  of  time?  But  the  achievement 
of  this  happiness  is  imperiled  by  some  dangers 

46 


Natural  Infant  Feeding 

to  health  and  life  for  which  we  do  not  feel  our- 
selves to  blame,  and  other  dangers  to  health  and 
life  for  which  we  do  find  ourselves  to  blame. 
A  death,  a  chronic  illness,  a  life  of  imbecility,  or 
insanity,  having  come  to  pass,  can  we  say  it  was 
or  was  not  due  primarily  to  one  or  more  depar- 
tures from  the  course  prescribed  by  Nature  for 
the  raising  of  children? 

A  brute  knows  enough  for  the  perpetuation  of 
its  kind,  even  under  great  difficulties.  That  is 
knowing  much,  and  that  knowledge  is  of  won- 
derfully good  utilitarian  quality.  Stripped  of 
education,  are  we  not  in  our  illiteracy  just  as 
well  equipped  with  knowledge  as  the  brute? 
However,  being  improved  by  education  and  be- 
ing moved  and  influenced  into  allowing  ourselves 
to  be  governed  by  the  spirit  of  learning,  we  have, 
wisely  enough,  determined  that  our  children 
shall  be  of  better  quality  than  we  were,  that  we 
shall  do  better  for  them  than  our  poor  illiterate 
parents  did  for  us,  better  than  our  poor  and  less 
learned  cousins  are  doing  for  their  children. 
More  than  that,  thanks  to  our  learning  and  in- 
genuity, we  are  able  to  reduce  to  a  minimum  the 
care,  drudgery  and  self-sacrifice  that  our  poor 
illiterate  mothers  endured  for  our  sakes. 

The  bright  idea  is  suggested,  or  occurs  to  the 
educated  mother,  so  early  as  to  permit  its  em- 
ployment to  the  fullest  extent  of  its  alleged 

47 


Messages  to  Mothers 


utility,  or  at  any  rate  the  idea  comes  and  is 
adopted  in  time  to  relieve  the  mother  from  that 
close  confinement  to  home,  that  untidiness  of 
dress  and  appearance  and  that  constant  associa- 
tion with  the  baby  that  must  prevail  when  it  is 
fed  in  the  natural  way.  The  bright  idea  will  be 
fruitful  of  still  more  and  greater  good;  bottle 
feeding  of  the  baby  will  permit  the  mother  to 
enjoy  much  of  the  freedom  of  the  woman  who 
has  no  baby.  What  an  immense  difference  in 
favor  of  the  mother  does  the  modern  bottle  feed- 
ing make!  Great  is  the  temptation,  therefore, 
to  resort  to  it,  even  when  there  are  no  other  than 
the  mother's  selfish  motives  for  doing  so.  Only 
the  good  ends  are  thought  of,  possible  evils  are 
not  considered,  trouble  is  not  looked  for;  only 
successes  of  bottle  feeding  are  paraded.  As  for 
the  many  complete  failures  and  the  many  more 
partial  failures,  the  less  said  the  better;  the  sub- 
ject is  painful  to  those  who  know,  and  they  are 
not  believed  when  their  views,  derived  from  ex- 
perience, are  offered. 

There  is  an  uncatalogued  list  of  deaths, 
chronic  ills  and  imbecilities  for  which,  as  cause, 
some  details  of  infant  care  seem,  by  the  circum- 
stances of  the  case,  to  be  indicated  as  responsible. 
If,  in  the  survey  of  an  infant's  life,  nothing  were 
to  be  found  wrong  or  unnatural,  except  that  it 
is  being,  or  was,  fed  in  an  artificial  way,  that  fact 

48 


Natural  Infant  Feeding 

alone  would  prove  to  be  a  sufficient  wrong  to  ac- 
count for  any  evil  in  the  catalogue  that  might 
be  present  or  follow.  Bottle-fed  babies  that  were 
sick  and  growing  from  bad  to  worse,  under  the 
otherwise  most  favorable  circumstances  and  con- 
ditions, have  recovered  with  apparently  miracu- 
lous haste  when  restored  to  the  natural  way  of 
feeding  by  the  help  of  some  other  baby's  mother, 
or  a  milk-giving  goat,  showing  that  the  illness 
and  danger  to  life  in  the  case,  not  to  mention 
the  enduring  unhappiness  that  might  have  re- 
sulted, were  entirely  due  to  the  departure  from 
the  natural  and  only  right  way  of  doing  this 
particular  detail. 

Many  babies  die  from  no  other  cause  than  that 
their  mothers  fail  to  feed  them  naturally.  It  is 
disease  that  sooner  or  later  kills,  or  more  or  less 
irretrievably  injures  the  child  and  damages  all 
its  prospects.  In  case  of  death  the  disease  is 
named  as  cause,  with  no  reference,  however,  to 
the  cause  of  the  disease.  The  number  of  deaths 
is  great,  but  the  number  of  cases  of  illness  aris- 
ing out  of  the  unnatural  procedure  called  bottle 
feeding  is  vastly  greater.  We  display  our  suc- 
cesses, but  keep  the  curtain  drawn  down  over 
our  failures.  "  That's  the  way  we  lost  our  first," 
said  a  man  to  me;  "my  wife  failed  to  nurse  it 
and  substitute  methods  failed."  But  that  was 
said  in  confidence  and  was  not  allowed  to  serve 

49 


Messages  to  Mothers 


as  a  lesson  to  the  present  and  prospective  edu- 
cated mothers  of  the  community. 

Within  my  little  sphere  of  work  and  observa- 
tion there  have  been  women  who  failed  to  feed 
their  babies  naturally.  In  these  cases  the  ladies 
were  so  well  and  strong  that  there  seemed  to  be 
no  reason  why  their  milk  supply  should  so  pre- 
maturely fail.  Why  does  the  milk  supply  fail 
prematurely?  My  answer  follows  and  is  a  mat- 
ter of  simple  instruction;  where  all  intentions 
are  good,  it  will  enable  the  mother  to  abide  by 
the  natural  and  only  safe  way  of  baby  feeding, 
if  she  is  in  a  reasonably  good  and  comfortable 
state  of  health. 

The  physician  is,  of  course,  dominated  by  his 
views  of  the  case  in  hand,  which  views  are  gen- 
erally in  accord  with  the  consensus  of  profes- 
sional opinion  in  regard  to  such  matters, — all 
of  which  is  proper  so  far  as  the  physician  is  con- 
cerned, however  much  the  basis  of  such  opin- 
ion— even  the  consensus  of  opinion — may  be 
open  to  suspicion.  The  physician  in  turn  domi- 
nates the  patient,  presumably  with  her  consent, 
but  sometimes  without  such  consent,  either  of 
the  patient  or  any  of  her  family,  as,  for  example, 
when  confinement  occurs  in  a  hospital  alleged  to 
be  first  class  in  respect  to  all  material  and  intel- 
lectual equipment.  It  does  happen  that  able- 
bodied  mothers  are  discharged  from  such  hospi- 

50 


Natural  Infant  Feeding 


tals  with  infants  which  they  are  unable  to  feed, 
because  their  mammary  glands  have  without 
their  knowledge  or  consent  been  "  dried  up  "  by 
means  of  drugs.  This  is  the  physician's  way  of 
anticipating  and  settling  at  once  the  question  of 
the  mother's  ability  to  feed  or  not  to  feed  her 
baby. 

In  other  cases  the  mother  will  have  fed  the 
baby  one,  two,  three  or  more  months;  then  it 
will  be  apparent  that  the  baby  is  not  thriving, 
that  the  milk  supply  is  scant,  or  deficient  in 
some  detail  of  quality.  Tests  of  the  mother's 
milk  are  made  and  show  it  to  be  defective  in  im- 
portant respects.  The  bottle  method  is  then  in- 
troduced and  the  breasts  are  allowed  to  go  out  of 
service,  and  once  out  of  service  for  even  a  few 
days,  the  mammary  glands  cannot,  so  far  as  I 
know,  be  induced  to  resume  their  milk-giving 
function. 

The  past  and  present  examples  of  mothers, 
educated  and  cultivated,  easily  feeding  their 
babies  naturally,  are  enough  to  justify  the  con- 
viction that  these  able-bodied  mothers  who  are 
being  "dried  up"  by  design  can  also  feed  their 
babies.  I  will  show  and  am  prepared  to  demon- 
strate that  safer  means  based  on  simpler  reason- 
ing easily  give  us  not  only  better  but  perfectly 
natural,  good,  old-fashioned  luck  in  feeding  the 
baby.  The  prospective  mother  having  been  duly 

51 


Messages  to  Mothers 


warned  of  an  innocent-looking  danger  that 
would  imperil  the  chief  enduring  source  of  her 
life's  happiness,  I  must  ask  her  attention  to  the 
same  principles  and  the  same  reasoning  that  I 
have  employed  in  explaining  the  sickness  of 
pregnancy  and  its  treatment. 

We  understand  now  that  for  the  organization 
and  growth  of  the  fetus  the  mother  supplies  the 
structure  materials  and  the  power.  After  birth 
the  mother  still  supplies  the  baby  with  structure 
and  fuel  materials,  but  out  of  the  fuels  the  baby 
evolves  its  own  power  for  its  growth  and  func- 
tions. Until  the  beginning  of  the  weaning  period 
the  mother  in  the  natural  course  of  events  still 
continues  to  eat  and  digest  an  additional  share 
of  foods  and  to  elaborate  the  same  into  milk  for 
the  baby.  The  power  which  the  mother  appro- 
priates for  this  extra  digestion  and  this  elabora- 
tion is  here  the  one  chief  item  of  interest,  the 
one  thing  to  be  understood.  Conditions  being  at 
all  favorable,  the  mother  will  certainly  take  in 
and  digest  foods  enough  for  all  purposes,  and 
the  power  sufficient  to  elaborate  plenty  of  milk 
for  the  baby  will  certainly  be  available  for  that 
purpose.  The  always  consistent  nature  of  the 
animal — the  subconscious  mind — certainly  al- 
ways attends  to  this  matter  so  perfectly,  so  natu- 
rally, so  easily  and,  I  may  say,  so  automatically 
that  one  needs  take  no  cognizance  of  the  process 

52 


Natural  Infant  Feeding 


and  needs  no  learning  to  aid  it.  That  the  mother 
requires  more  than  her  personal  need  of  food  is 
a  simple  fact  only  to  be  noticed  as  such,  but  this 
fact  is  not  to  influence  the  mother  in  her  selec- 
tion of  foods,  neither  in  respect  to  quantity  nor 
quality.  Conscious  knowledge  of  extra  needs  is 
very  likely  to  induce  interference  with  that 
natural  selection  which  is  prompted  by  the  sub- 
conscious mind  so  unerringly  and  so  perfectly 
that  conscious  aid  or  interference  simply  hinders 
and  renders  selection  inefficient  and  erroneous. 
I  mean  to  say  that  the  illiterate  nursing  mother 
makes  a  better  selection  of  foods  without  con- 
scious thought  than  the  learned  mother  does 
with  the  aid  of  what  she  reads  or  hears  on  the 
subject.  It  will  be  enough  to  say  that  the  mother 
should  have  what  she  feels  she  needs  and  there- 
fore wants. 

A  case  presenting  itself,  we  assume  that  the 
mother  is  in  a  reasonably  good,  comfortable  and 
useful  state  of  health,  that  she  takes  food  enough, 
that  her  milk-producing  laboratory  is  in  good 
order,  that  power  for  its  operation  is  ready  and 
available.  On  these  points  it  is  not  likely  to  be 
necessary  to  make  any  inquiry  or  offer  any  in- 
struction, so  well  does  the  subconscious  mind 
take  care  of  them  when  not  interfered  with  by 
the  conscious  mind.  The  milk  supply,  however, 
does  not  materialize  in  the  case. 

53 


Messages  to  Mothers 


As  already  explained  in  the  discussion  of 
power  in  physiological  functions,  an  hour  of 
purely  mental  work  costs  as  much  power  as  two 
and  one-half  hours  of  hard  manual  labor.  The 
illiterate  mother  has  plenty  of  power  even 
though  she  performs  hard  labor,  because  a  day's 
manual  labor  will  not  ordinarily  exhaust  her 
supply  of  power  so  far  as  to  leave  her  without 
enough  for  the  elaboration  of  milk.  When  ap- 
propriated for  necessary  or  unnecessary  mental 
effort,  at  rapid  rates  of  speed,  the  quantity  of 
power  used  will  often  be  so  great  that  the  supply 
will  become  exhausted,  the  woman  will  be  tired, 
the  milk  supply  will  for  an  afternoon  or  an 
evening  fail.  A  maximum  combination  of  talk- 
ing, reading,  music  and  study,  with  some  manual 
labor,  and  all  these  at  a  high  rate  of  speed,  will 
leave  no  power  for  the  elaboration  of  milk.  This 
view  of  the  matter  will  readily  be  confirmed  by 
the  educated  mother  of  experience  who  has  cor- 
rectly fed  all  her  babies.  She  will  remember  an 
afternoon,  some  callers,  speedy  and  lively  gossip, 
a  riot  of  voices,  jolly  time,  rather  strenuous 
though,  and  that  evening  there  was  only  the 
scantiest  supply  of  milk  for  the  baby. 

Elaborating  milk  is  an  extra  duty,  just  as 
carrying  and  supporting  the  fetus  was.  It  makes 
an  extra  demand  for  power,  just  as  any  extra 
duty  would  do.  Compensation  must  be  made  by 

54 


Natural  Infant  Feeding- 


omitting  some  other  expenditures  of  power,  by 
leaving  some  other  things  undone.  Power  for 
the  elaboration  of  milk  will  surely  always  be 
present  and  available;  but  designed,  prolonged 
and  speedy  mental  effort  will  cause  that  power 
to  be  diverted  and  appropriated  for  the  mental 
effort. 

While  it  is  the  educated  mother  who  is  most 
likely  to  fail  to  feed  her  baby,  it  is  not  at  all 
necessary  to  argue  against  higher  education  of 
women  on  this  account;  but  the  educated 
mother,  while  nursing  a  baby,  must  certainly, 
under  the  circumstances,  allow  her  mind  to  re- 
main mostly  at  rest;  she  must  abstain  from  vol- 
untary and  designed  thinking  and  from  mental 
work  which  involves  and  induces  such  thinking. 
There  is  no  objection  to  automatic  thinking,  be- 
cause that  does  not  seem  to  use  up  power  appre- 
ciably. It  will  be  enough  to  glance  at  the  head- 
lines of  the  daily  paper,  to  look  at  the  table  of 
contents  of  a  magazine,  to  see  only  a  minimum 
number  of  the  quietest  friends.  To  have  help  to 
do  all  her  housework  and  then  use  her  time  all 
the  more  for  mental  effort,  makes  matters  so 
much  the  worse.  It  is  an  advantage  to  a  woman 
to  have  to  do  her  own  housework,  if  for  no  other 
reason  than  that  it  keeps  her  from  mental  effort 
that  is  much  more  exhaustive  of  power.  To  read 
regularly  a  morning  paper  and  an  evening  paper 

55 


Messages  to  Mothers 


is  in  itself  an  exhausting  vice,  not  to  mention 
much  other  magazine  and  novel  reading  and 
talking  that  the  educated  woman  will  do.  The 
milk  supply  fails  in  quantity  and  quality  because 
the  power,  which  is  present  and  available  for 
elaborating  milk,  is  diverted  to  operate  the  brain 
in  the  performance  of  all  the  mental  work  and 
play  that  the  educated  woman  seems  to  think  it 
her  duty  to  do  and  to  continue  doing  through 
the  periods  of  pregnancy  and  nursing. 

It  seems  hardly  necessary  to  specify  further 
what  the  nursing  mother  will  now  do  when  she 
finds  the  baby's  natural  milk  supply  deficient  in 
quantity  or  quality.  From  what  has  been  said 
of  the  cause,  she  will  understand  the  remedy 
without  further  explanation.  But  repetition  is 
favorable  to  impression  of  the  learner,  so  a  very 
brief  summary,  defining  the  natural  manage- 
ment of  the  case,  even  at  the  expense  of  repeat- 
ing some  things  that  have  already  been  said,  will, 
I  am  sure,  be  advantageous  to  the  learned  mother 
who  is  seriously  concerned  in  this  matter.  The 
mother,  while  nursing  a  baby,  is  supposed  to  be 
in  a  reasonably  good,  comfortable  and  useful 
state  of  health.  She  should  and  she  certainly 
may  eat  anything  she  feels  she  needs  and  as 
much  as  she  feels  she  needs.  When  it  is  under- 
stood that  she  should  limit  her  selections  to  such 
things  as  are  included  within  the  range  of  natural 

56 


Natural  Infant  Feeding1 

foods,  those  that  are  least  affected  by  artificial 
modification  and  conglomeration  and  that  are 
fresh  or  in  a  good  state  of  preservation,  then  it 
may  be  said  she  may  eat  anything  and  every- 
thing she  wants  and  as  much  as  she  wants.  The 
want  that  is  to  be  respected  and  satisfied  is  that 
which  is  based  upon  a  need,  not  that  which  is 
based  upon  the  like  of  a  thing.  The  "need" 
wants  get  us  into  no  trouble;  the  "like"  wants 
lead  us  beyond  the  range  of  natural  foods  into 
that  of  the  artificial,  and  the  unduly  mixed  and 
conglomerated  things  that  are  contrived  to 
satisfy  likes  rather  than  needs. 

Experience,  of  the  individual,  of  the  family, 
of  the  community,  of  the  race,  is  the  teacher  in 
iratters  of  food  selection.  Of  what  weight,  for 
example,  is  the  adverse  opinion  of  the  chemist  in 
regard  to  rice  in  the  presence  of  the  fact  that 
rice  is,  and  for  the  longest  time  has  been,  the 
most  used  and  most  repeatedly  used  of  all  cereal 
grains.  Feeling  in  this  matter  of  selection  is  re- 
liable, reason  is  unreliable.  Food  selection  is  a 
province  of  the  subconscious  mind,  which  will  so 
persistently  insist  on  minding  its  own  business 
that  the  educated  conscious  mind  of  the  same 
person  cannot  assist  it  in  selection;  much  less 
can  the  educated  mind  of  the  doctor,  or  any  other 
person,  meddle  with  a  patient's  own  function  of 
selection.  But  while  that  very  useful  member  of 

57 


Messages  to  Mothers 


society  can  never  arbitrarily  select  and  success- 
fully prescribe  foods,  he  can  and  should  assist  the 
patient  to  the  true  conclusions  from  experience 
in  general  and  her  experience  in  particular,  and 
assist  her  to  the  correct  natural  interpretations  of 
her  longings  and  bring  her  back  to  the  domina- 
tion of  her  own  subconscious  mind  when  learn- 
ing, which  did  not  happen  to  be  science,  has  led 
her  astray  in  the  matter  of  selection. 

The  nursing  mother  must  have  good  diges- 
tion; digestion  requires  power.  From  the  mo- 
ment she  begins  to  eat  she  must  refrain  from 
such  mental  effort  and  be  free  from  all  such  an- 
noyance as  will  use  up  power  and  cause  diversion 
of  the  same  from  the  function  of  digestion. 
"  Unquiet  meals  make  ill  digestions."  The  same 
personal  quiet  must  continue  during  her  undis- 
turbed rest  of  about  an  hour  after  each  meal. 
Since  it  is  mental  effort  that  consumes  power  so 
fast  and  causes  the  diversion  of  so  much  of  it 
from  the  apparatus  of  digestion,  it  is  from  mental 
effort  that  the  nursing  mother  must  especially 
abstain  during  and  for  an  hour  after  meals.  The 
rule  of  resting  after  meals  need  not  be  so  strictly 
enforced  in  regard  to  any  easy  and  trifling  duties 
that  may  seem  necessary  and  that  she  may  wish 
to  do  and  find  pleasure  in  doing.  But  the  abso- 
lute rest,  relaxation,  of  mind  and  body  in  an  easy- 
chair,  and  alone,  will  generally  be  the  best  thing 

58 


Natural  Infant  Feeding1 


under  the  circumstances.  Strenuous  effort  at 
quieting  the  mind  should,  of  course,  not  be  at- 
tempted, because  that  would  involve  the  very 
mental  effort  that  we  are  trying  to  avoid.  Let 
the  automatic  thinking  go  on  as  it  will;  let  it 
busy  itself  with  the  passing  objects  seen  from  the 
window,  or  with  the  passing  subjects  of  memory; 
the  hour  will  thus  be  made  pleasant  and  will 
seem  to  pass  quickly.  Automatic  thinking  does 
not  seem  to  consume  power  appreciably.  It  is 
the  intentional,  volitional  thinking  that  uses  up 
power  faster  than  hard  labor.  The  recumbent 
position  is  not  favorable  to  digestion.  The  semi- 
recumbent  position  is  the  best,  as  on  a  reclining- 
chair,  or  on  a  lounge  which  permits  head  and 
shoulders  to  remain  considerably  elevated  and 
the  abdominal  wall  to  be  relaxed. 

The  mother  adopting  these  instructions  will 
at  first  watch  the  clock  for  the  expiration  of  the 
arbitrary  hour;  later  on,  after  some  weeks,  it 
will  be  her  feeling  that  she  will  watch  for  the 
moment  when  she  may  go  to  work.  The  pro- 
priety of  the  rest  will  be  felt;  that  there  is  no 
power  just  then  available  for  work  will  also  be 
felt.  The  power  is  there,  but  it  is  being  used  for 
digestion;  it  can  be  diverted  and  used  for  work, 
but  then  digestion  would  be  defective.  In  about 
an  hour  power  becomes  available  for  work;  feel- 
ing informs  one  of  that  fact  and  prompts  her  to 

59 


Messages  to  Mothers 


go  about  her  duties.  From  that  moment  rest  is 
no  longer  necessary,  desirable  nor  agreeable.  To 
rest  somewhat  in  this  fashion  is,  as  any  one  must 
know,  in  accord  with  universal  custom  of  many 
familiar  animals  and  all  peoples.  Under  artifi- 
cial conditions  and  under  the  mastery  of  em- 
ployer, this  natural  custom,  I  may  say  this 
natural  law,  of  having  our  meals  in  peace  and  a 
rest  afterwards,  is  much  disregarded,  with  no 
gain  in  the  matter  of  work  done  by  the  indi- 
vidual and  certainly  with  deterioration  of  the 
individual  health. 

The  mother  being  in  a  reasonably  good  state 
of  health,  it  should  not  for  a  moment  be  believed 
that  she  cannot  feed  her  baby  naturally.  The 
mammary  glands  should  be  assumed  to  be  in 
good  condition,  power  is  certainly  present  and 
available  for  the  elaboration  of  milk,  the  subcon- 
scious mind  of  the  woman  is  to  be  trusted  abso- 
lutely for  the  good  condition  and  good  working 
order  of  every  detail  required  under  the  circum- 
stances. There  remains,  then,  only  one  thing  for 
the  conscious  mind  to  see  to;  that  is,  let  not  the 
power  of  the  woman  be  diverted  for  mental  ef- 
fort to  such  an  extent  that  not  enough  is  left 
available  for  the  elaboration  of  milk.  Experience 
will  soon  teach  her  the  limit  to  which  she  can 
safely  go  in  the  direction  of  mental  effort  and 
yet  do  justice  to  the  baby. 

60 


Chapter  IV 

The  Maternity  Nurse 

Spontaneous  Intuition  Compared 
with  Artificial  Training 


IN  REGARD  to  the  details  of  infant  care, 
the  thing  the  mother  feels  like  doing,  or  the 
way  she  feels  like  doing  it,  will  be  about 
right,  because  it  is  so  prompted  and  directed 
by  her  subconscious  mind,  her  inerrant  nature. 
The  mother  will  not  allow  herself  to  do  that 
which  she  feels  is  not  right  in  infant  care  and  she 
should  not  permit  the  same  to  be  done  by  a 
nurse,  however  learned  and  artificially  trained, 
who  may  prove  so  dominant  as  to  insist  on  it  as 
authorized  by  what  she  has  read  or  been  taught 
on  the  subject. 

The  baby's  health  will  to  some  extent  depend 
on  the  mother's  health,  which  is  therefore  an  ob- 
ject of  solicitude.  The  mother  will  have  her  wits 
about  her  and  will  not  quite  need  to  resign  her- 
self into  the  absolute  guardianship  of  the  nurse. 
The  mother's  subconscious  mind  will  still  con- 
tinue to  be  her  guardian  intelligence  and  is  still 
to  be  trusted  in  the  matter  of  details  of  her 
personal  welfare  and  especially  in  the  matter  of 
the  selection  of  her  foods.  The  mind  of  a  domi- 

61 


Messages  to  Mothers 


nant  nurse,  stocked  with  its  artificial  learning 
and  its  contempt  for  the  real  scientific  lessons 
and  examples  of  Nature,  should  not  be  allowed 
to  induce  the  mother  to  do  or  select  anything  to 
which  she  feels  an  aversion. 

An  Example. — A  complication  of  chronic  di- 
gestive disorders,  lasting  many  years,  had  its 
origin  during  confinement  when  the  artificially 
wise  nurse  insisted  on  the  patient  consuming 
spoon  victuals  that  she  did  not  want,  instead  of 
the  common,  plain,  ordinary  diet  that  the  mother 
did  want,  but  which  the  nurse  did  not  allow  her 
to  have. 

Second  Example. — An  artificially  trained 
nurse  holds  a  baby  balanced  on  her  left  hand 
while  with  her  right  she  bathes  it  with  a  sponge. 
The  baby  is  in  an  extreme  state  of  alarm  during 
the  bath  and  cries  all  that  time  in  a  manner 
heartrending  and  damaging  to  the  mother. 
The  procedure  takes  place  out  of  the  mother's 
sight  where  the  dominating  nurse  has  her  own 
artificial  way  unobserved  and  uncriticized,  allow- 
ing the  inference  that  the  nurse  and  her  modern 
method  are  correct  enough,  but  that  it  is  the 
baby  that  is  naughty.  This  was  done  thirty 
days.  The  mother  seemed  unable  to  obtain  any 
good  reason  for  the  baby's  crying  and  did  not 
find  out  until  her  mother  came,  saw  and  rightly 
explained  that  the  alarmed  state  of  the  baby 

62 


The  Maternity  Nurse 


was  due  to  finding  itself  abruptly  grasped  and 
lifted  to  mid-air  and  there  poised  in  the  unnat- 
ural situation  of  nothing  for  its  head  and  limbs 
to  touch  or  rest  upon. 

Daily  to  the  extent  of  thirty  days  a  state  of 
mental  terror  was  combined  for  the  baby  with 
its  bath,  and  as  many  times  was  the  anxious 
mother  alarmed  for  the  safety  of  the  child.  It  is 
at  least  our  fear  that  this  baby  will  suffer  from 
future  evil  results  of  the  impression  thus  ruth- 
lessly made  and  deepened  and  intensified  by  rep- 
etition. The  baby's  health  depends  upon  that 
of  the  mother  to  some  extent;  if  the  mother's 
health  suffer  from  this  repeated  agony,  still  so 
nuch  the  worse  for  the  baby. 

Third  Example . — Another  artificially  trained 
nurse,  and  I  am  told  there  were  more  of  her 
kind  at  the  artificial  institution  of  her  origin, 
had  a  reason  why  the  baby  should  not  be  allowed 
to  the  breast  until  after  the  expiration  of  three 
days.  The  mother's  respect  for  up-to-date  learn- 
ing allowed  her  to  be  dominated  into  yielding  to 
the  nurse,  and  so  the  baby  was  forced  to  begin  its 
career  with  a  three  days'  fast. 

Our  conscious  mind  does  not  clearly  enlighten 
us  on  the  nature  and  remote  results  of  the 
agonizing  impression  made  on  the  plastic  instru- 
mentality of  the  infant  mind  by  an  enforced  ab- 
solute fast  during  the  first  three  days  of  its  life, 

63 


Messages  to  Mothers 


but  our  subconscious  mind  persists  in  presenting 
the  feeling  that  such  unnatural,  cruel  and  un- 
necessary procedure  can  only  be  fruitful  of  future 
evil  to  the  victim  and  incidental  unhappiness  to 
those  responsible  for  him. 

The  misguided  nurse  will  suffer  no  evil  conse- 
quences for  her  blunders;  for  her  mistakes  the 
innocent  victim  will  suffer  and  incidentally  the 
victim's  mother,  the  family,  and  finally,  but  al- 
most surely,  the  state.  The  nurse  is  not  respon- 
sible, the  mother  is.  No  mother  should  for  a 
moment  resign  to  a  disinterested  stranger  the 
direction  of  the  affairs  of  her  baby,  and  her  own 
feelings  and  common  sense  should  be  regarded 
always  as  a  higher  authority  for  action  than 
what  she  reads  or  what  "they  say"  on  the  sub- 
ject. 

The  baby  was  forced  to  fast  three  days  before 
it  was  allowed  access  to  its  mother's  breast; 
it  was,  however,  given  warm  water  during  this 
time.  These  must  have  been  three  days  of 
agonizing  "lock-out"  from  its  natural  food,  its 
natural  drink,  its  natural  medicine,  its  natural 
and  necessary  function  of  developing  the  nipple 
and  from  its  only  occupation.  These  were  also 
three  days  of  arrested  development  for  the 
baby  and  three  days  of  doubt,  anxiety,  fear  and 
suspicion  on  the  part  of  the  mother  who  trusted 
in  the  latest  learning  and  who  must  have  felt 

64 


The  Maternity  Nurse 


that  she  was  ignoring  her  own  inherited,  natural, 
maternal  wisdom. 

There  was  also  neglect  or  omission  of  the 
necessary  function  of  relieving  the  mammary 
glands,  which  only  the  baby  can  best  and  most 
naturally  do,  which  should  always  be  the  baby's 
occupation,  entered  upon  when,  after  its  bath, 
dressing,  sleep  and  rest  from  the  ordeal  of  its 
advent,  it  awakens  and  begins  to  struggle  with 
evident  motive  and  object  in  view.  The  mam- 
mary secretion,  whether  it  be  called  milk  or 
colostrum  during  the  first  three  days,  purges  the 
baby;  that  is  natural  and  therefore  proper,  and 
no  attempt  should  be  made  to  improve  upon  this 
detail.  It  is  decidedly  unsafe  to  make  radical 
changes  in  methods  established  by  Nature. 

Still  another  painful  and  distressing  evil  re- 
sult of  the  new  idea  was  the  intense  suffering  of 
the  mother  for  two  months  from  diseased  breasts, 
from  which,  after  three  months,  she  was  finally 
relieved  by  the  natural  wisdom  and  labor  of  a 
nurse  who  had  no  artificial  training  or  learning, 
but  who  had  natural  intelligence  and  natural 
experience  unadulterated  with  the  utterances  of 
those  who  have  no  children  for  the  alleged  bene- 
fit of  those  who  have.  And  we  have  not  yet  the 
last  of  such  indiscreet  haste  to  adopt  an  alleged 
new  idea  where  the  old  idea  had  proven  itself 
perfectly  good  in  a  case  where  so  much  is  at 

65 


Messages  to  Mothers 


stake.  There  remain  yet  the  questions:  What 
lasting  harm  does  it  leave  impressed  upon  the 
mother?  What  evil-bearing  impression  does  it 
leave  upon  the  child? 

Of  new  ideas  "  many  are  called  but  few  are 
chosen"  for  adoption.  The  affairs  of  maternity 
should  not  at  any  rate  be  allowed  to  serve  as  oc- 
casion for  experiment.  There  is  altogether  too 
much  at  stake  in  these  affairs.  Vastly  better  and 
safer  is  it  to  abide  by  ideas  and  methods  that 
have  survived  from  time  immemorial  and  are 
sanctioned  by  usages  that  are  universal  in  such 
cases  than  to  adopt  any  that  are  but  just  come 
into  local  existence  or  have  at  best  been  but  short 
lived.  With  all  due  respect  for  the  learning  and 
training  of  the  nurse  for  other  purposes,  I  should 
in  maternity  cases  vote  for  the  nurse  who  is  sim- 
ply a  good  plain  woman,  ready  and  willing  to 
perform  her  part  in  a  manner  consistent  with 
both  the  maternal  instinct  of  the  mother  and  of 
the  nurse  herself.  The  maternity  nurse  with 
natural  experience  only,  has  at  present  a  better 
reputation  for  safe  natural  service  than  the 
learned  maternity  nurse  with  artificial  training. 


66 


Chapter  V 

Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

Their  Causes,  Results,  Prevention 
and  Cure 

WHETHER  the  baby  is  fed  natu- 
rally or  otherwise,  the  time  comes 
when  it  will  express  signs  of  dis- 
satisfaction with  its  subsistence, 
signs  of  additional  wants,  longings  and  urgent 
needs.  These  begin  to  appear  at  any  time  from 
seven  to  twelve  months  of  age  and,  exception- 
ally, earlier  and  later  than  seven  and  twelve 
months.  The  baby  becomes  restless,  cross,  cry- 
ing more  or  less,  pushing  itself  from  the  mother's 
breast  or  turning  with  plainly  apparent  displeas- 
ure from  the  sight  of  the  coming  bottle.  It 
does  not  appear  to  be  sick  but  we  know  it  is  not 
happy.  If  it  has  up  to  this  time  been  well,  that 
fa6t  speaks  well  for  the  care  it  has  received  and 
there  should  be  no  reason  why  it  should  not 
continue  well.  Even  teething  will  not  generally 
be  a  disturbing  cause  sufficient  to  account  for 
the  unhappy,  the  distressed  and  worried  condi- 
tion of  the  baby.  If  the  baby  has  arrived  at  the 
proper  age,  seven  months  or  more,  or,  disregard- 
ing its  age,  if  it  is  big  enough  and  strong 

67 


Messages  to  Mothers 


enough,  or  seems  old  enough,  even  though  it  is 
not  so,  it  will  not  only  be  proper,  but  it  will  be 
necessary,  to  consider  possible  additional  wants 
on  its  part  and  therefore  additional  needs. 

The  baby  is  an  animal  in  a  state  of  nature, 
however  artificial  its  material  environment  may 
already  be.  Personally,  it  is  not  yet  artificial- 
ized;  it  has  yet  no  likes  and  dislikes  that  can  be 
regarded  as  having  resulted  from  experience;  it 
has  yet  no  artificial  habits.  When,  therefore,  it 
wants  a  thing,  we  may  seriously  conclude  that 
it  needs  the  thing  wanted.  The  baby  wants  its 
mother's  presence,  her  sympathy,  her  contact, 
her  embraces.  The  baby  needs  these  and  it 
would  fail  to  achieve  its  best  possible  develop- 
ment of  body  and  mind  if  deprived  of  these 
even  in  part,  and  it  would  not  live  long  if  to- 
tally deprived  of  these  details  of  infant  care. 

In  the  case  of  the  young  baby  it  seems  to  me 
that  if  we  omit  the  word  like  and  do  not  use  the 
idea  it  conveys,  we  will  so  much  the  better  un- 
derstand the  subject  of  infant  needs.  Likes  are 
acquired,  are  associated  with  experience,  are  mat- 
ters of  habit  and  may  involve  the  use  of  things 
that  are  not  natural  foods.  Wants,  however,  are 
constitutional  and  are  expressions  of  the  subcon- 
scious mind's  demands  for  natural  foods  which 
the  baby  may  never  have  had  and  of  which  it 
can  have  no  conscious  conception  nor  impression 

68 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

based  on  experience.  To  say  that  a  baby  wants 
a  certain  item  of  food  includes  the  idea  of  its 
liking  that  food,  but  excludes  the  idea,  as  we 
wish  it  to,  of  the  liking  being  acquired  and 
prejudiced  by  experience  or  even  the  slightest 
semblance  of  habit.  That  the  baby  likes  what 
it  wants  goes  without  saying.  When  the  baby 
wants  a  food  it  will  certainly  need  it,  and  so 
serious  and  urgent  is  that  need  that  the  baby 
will  not  thrive  without  the  object  of  that  want. 
This  statement  is  easily  substantiated  by  experi- 
ence, and  some  experience  of  this  character  can 
be  found  in  almost  every  family;  but  it  should 
not  be  taken  to  indicate  any  difficulties  in  pros- 
pect for  the  baby.  A  baby  is  the  easiest,  most 
submissive  and  most  compromising  character  to 
deal  with  as  a  patient. 

The  baby's  wants  will  have  reference  generally 
to  classes  of  foods  rather  than  to  any  special 
food  of  a  class.  When,  for  example,  it  wants  a 
starchy  food  it  will  be  satisfied  with  anv  cereal 
grain,  or  any  starchy  root,  that  has  been  used  by 
a  great  many  people  for  a  great  length  of  time 
and  has  thus  been  proved  to  be  a  good  food  and 
capable  of  being  oft  repeated.  When  the  baby 
wants  meat,  any  lean  meat  will  be  satisfactory. 
So  when  it  wants  fat  meat,  it  will  not  be  very 
particular  as  to  what  variety.  The  baby  will,  of 
course,  get  the  best  there  is  and  everything  fresh 

69 


Messages  to  Mothers 


or  in  a  good  state  of  preservation.  The  baby's 
diet  should  certainly  not  include  anything  but 
natural  foods  in  a  simple,  unconglomerated,  un- 
modified state  of  preparation. 

What  are  the  best  foods?  The  answer,  made 
conclusive  by  observation  and  experience  before 
the  food  expert  and  the  chemist  were  born,  is, 
those  foods  that  have  been  used  by  any  great 
number  of  people  any  great  length  of  time  and 
have  been  most  repeatedly  used  during  that 
time,  they  are  the  best  foods.  Those  foods  that 
we  naturally  and  without  prejudice  select  most 
frequently  and  which  we  may  therefore  designate 
as  the  most  "repeatable"  foods  are  for  that  rea- 
son the  best  foods.  It  is  easier  to  see  this  than  to 
prove  it,  and  what  is  the  use  of  proving  what  is 
so  easily  seen?  Rice,  for  example,  is  the  best  of 
all  cereal  grains,  because  it  is  by  anybody  more 
often  "  repeatable,"  is  used  by  more  hundreds  of 
millions  of  people  and  has  probably  been  in  use 
longer  than  any  other  cereal  grain.  The  potato 
is  by  far  the  most  "repeatable"  vegetable  in  use 
among  the  most  civilized  peoples.  Beef  is  by  far 
the  most  "repeatable"  meat.  Beef  fat  is  the 
most  "repeatable"  fat  in  ordinary  use  among  us 
in  the  United  States  of  America.  Speaking  of 
beef  fat  we,  of  course,  include  butter;  but  but- 
ter is  not  pure,  as  the  milk  cannot  be  entirely 
separated  from  it;  the  one  to  two  per  cent  of 

70 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

milk  remaining  in  the  butter  soon  spoils,  and 
spoils  the  butter,  so  that  in  addition  to  being  an 
impure  fat  it  is  also  a  stale  fat. 

Among  oils  used  as  foods,  the  olive  oil  is  the 
most "  repeatable."  I  mention  only  the  best  rep- 
resentatives of  classes  of  foods  that  we  must 
depend  on.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  we  should 
live  on  these  exclusively,  but  I  do  mean  to  say 
that  the  subconscious  mind  chooses  these  items 
most  frequently,  and  the  choice  is  a  matter  of 
feeling  and  not  reason.  The  conscious  mind  with 
its  reasonings  could  never  cause  beef  to  be  super- 
seded by  mutton,  or  turkey,  or  chicken.  No  other 
vegetable  that  we  have  in  the  United  States 
could  be  made  to  replace  the  potato.  It  seems 
to  me  that  we  can  use  olive  oil  every  day  for  life. 
We  can  use  cotton-seed  oil  every  day  for  a  while, 
but  we  cannot  long  continue  its  use.  We  may 
try  it  designedly,  but  then  we  soon  find  that  di- 
gestion fails.  One  oil  may  be  as  digestible  and 
in  every  way  just  as  meritorious  as  the  other 
and  we  may  not  be  able  to  tell  them  apart  and 
we  may  not  be  able  to  detect  any  adulteration 
of  one  by  the  other;  we  may  be  satisfied  to  have 
our  meat,  fish  and  potatoes  fried  in  either,  or  a 
mixture  of  the  two  oils,  so  far  as  the  reasoning 
conscious  mind  is  concerned,  but  you  cannot  fool 
the  stomach  with  your  cotton-seed  oil,  not  even 
with  your  slightest  adulteration.  People  will 

71 


Messages  to  Mothers 


say  that  cotton-seed  oil  disagrees  with  them;  I 
would  say  that  the  stomach  disagrees  on  the 
selection  of  it,  and  refuses  to  do  its  work  if  any 
cotton-seed  oil  is  present.  Whenever  a  person 
tells  me  he  cannot  use  oil,  I  feel  pretty  certain 
that  he  has  never  fairly  tried  pure  olive  oil. 

I  am  not  forgetting  to  mention  lard  as  a 
handy,  "repeatable"  and  much  used  fat;  but  I 
leave  pork  and  all  food  products  of  pork  out  of 
consideration  except  to  find  a  fault  with  pork 
which  may  supply  a  motive  sufficient  to  induce 
some  people  to  abstain  from  it.  The  law  of 
Moses  very  strictly  forbade  the  use  of  pork.  In 
Leviticus,  eleventh  chapter,  the  seventh  verse 
reads:  "And  the  swine,  though  he  divide  the 
hoof,  and  be  clovenfooted,  yet  he  cheweth  not 
the  cud;  he  is  unclean  to  you."  Moses  must  have 
been  very  particular  in  regard  to  this  item  of  the 
law,  and  did  not  want  to  leave  room  for  any  mis- 
take or  misunderstanding  on  the  question  of 
pork,  so  he  said  further,  in  the  eighth  verse:  "  Of 
their  flesh  shall  ye  not  eat,  and  their  carcase 
shall  ye  not  touch;  they  are  unclean  to  you." 
That  plainly  meant  the  exclusion  of  lard  and  did 
not  even  permit  a  Jew  to  eat  a  piece  of  pie 
whereof  the  crust  was  shortened  with  lard.  I  do 
not  for  a  moment  doubt  that  there  were  the  best 
of  reasons  for  this  unconditional  prohibition  of 
pork;  I  believe  these  reasons  were  deduced  from 

72 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

ages  of  experience  which  finally  taught  the  nec- 
essity of  the  law  as  formulated  by  Moses  on  this 
subject  of  swine  as  a  source  of  food.  I  do  not 
know  what  these  reasons  were  nor  of  any  way  of 
finding  out.  The  best  we  can  do  is  to  see  if 
there  is  at  present  any  good  reason  why  we 
should  not  even  touch  pork,  and,  if  we  find  good 
cause  for  total  abstinence  from  pork  in  our  time, 
we  may  assume  that  it  is  the  same  as  that  which 
existed  in  the  time  of  Moses. 

Pork  is  extremely  convenient  and  "  repeatable  " 
for  all  purposes  for  which  it  is  used,  and  we  all 
like  it  the  world  over  in  the  shape  of  chops, 
roast,  spareribs,  pigs'  feet,  sausage,  bacon,  ham, 
and  the  lard  in  our  pie  crust  and  along  with  the 
several  good  things  that  are  fried  with  lard.  I 
would  not  stir  up  a  hornet's  nest  in  the  pursuit 
of  this  pork  question;  I  do  not  want  to  be  un- 
derstood as  suggesting  any  change  in  the  com- 
munity's attitude  toward  pork.  I  am  interested 
only  in  that  small  percentage  of  people  who 
have  ills  from  causes  which  do  not  trouble  the 
community  in  general.  I  am  only  dispensing 
a  little  utilitarian  learning  for  the  benefit  of  the 
few  exceptional  men,  women  and  children  who 
need  it.  These  few,  however,  make  up  a  large 
sum  in  the  aggregate,  and  an  affliction  of  one 
member  of  a  family  is  a  matter  of  concern  to 
the  whole  family;  and  the  afflictions  of  a  few  in 

73 


Messages  to  Mothers 


the  community  are  matters  of  concern  to  the 
community  in  general.  It  therefore  appears  to 
me  that  there  must  be  a  wide-spread  interest  in 
any  reasons  there  may  be  why  some  people 
should  abstain  from  pork  absolutely.  I  have 
found  one  reason;  it  may  seem  disappointing  to 
have  found  no  more,  but  this  one  reason  is  big 
enough  to  equal  several  ordinary  reasons.  I 
found  it  thirty-five  years  ago  and  have  had  an 
eye  on  it  ever  since,  so  I  am  sure  it  is  there  and 
that  it  persists  under  all  conditions  and  circum- 
stances. 

In  many  persons  pork,  however  small  the 
quantity  used,  produces  a  tendency  to  suppura- 
tion. This  tendency  shows  itself  by  the  appear- 
ance of  collections  of  pus  ranging  in  magnitude 
anywhere  from  a  very  little  pustule  to  a  large 
abscess.  Pustules,  sties,  felons,  boils,  carbuncles 
and  abscesses  are  familiar  and  are  due  to  pork. 
Those  who  abstain  absolutely  from  all  produces 
of  the  swine  do  not  have  anything  of  the  kind. 
When  a  wound  suppurates  more  or  less  and  is  a 
long  time  healing  under  conditions  otherwise 
favorable,  that  will  be  due  to  pork.  These  proc- 
esses of  suppuration  may  occur  in  any  part  of 
the  body,  and  may  do  irreparable  damage.  Ears 
have  been  destroyed,  kidneys  have  been  dam- 
aged, eyes  have  been  injured  and  pretty  faces 
have  been  disfigured  by  this  process  of  suppura- 

74 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

tion.  I  suggest  that  anybody  who  has  pustules, 
sties,  felons,  boils,  carbuncles,  abscesses  or  sup- 
purating sore  eyes,  will  be  able  to  refer  their  ap- 
pearance to  their  use  of  pork  several  times  within 
the  two  or  three  weeks  preceding;  and  that, 
when  one  finds  that  in  her  case  pork  produces 
this  tendency  to  suppuration,  it  will  be  wise  for 
her  to  abstain  absolutely. 

That  baby  to  which  we  are  supposed  to  be 
giving  our  present  attention  is  now  anywhere 
from  seven  to  twelve  months  of  age.  It  is  rest- 
less, ill-tempered  from  cause,  and  refuses  its  usual 
food  about  one-third  of  the  times  that  the  same 
is  offered.  The  parents  are  worried,  doctor  is 
consulted,  questions  are  asked,  details  are  heard, 
age  is  considered,  and  the  verdict  is  that  the  baby 
is  weaning  itself;  it  is  tapering  off  on  milk  and, 
of  course,  needs  and  therefore  wants  other  foods. 
What  shall  we  give  it?  ask  the  parents.  That 
is  a  question  that  would  only  be  asked  by  a  par- 
ent that  is  learned  or  at  least  influenced  by  the 
learning  of  others.  The  illiterate  woman  would 
not  even  think  on  this  matter;  she  knows  intui- 
tively what  to  give  the  baby;  and  the  dumb-ani- 
mal mother  would  think  still  less  on  the  subject, 
yet  she  has  the  same  experience  as  the  human 
mother.  The  animal  mother  in  a  state  of  Nature 
needs  no  light  on  the  subject;  the  primitive 
human  mother  needed  no  help  of  a  physician, 

75 


Messages  to  Mothers 


nor  of  a  baby-food  factory.  The  primitive 
woman,  simple,  poor  and  illiterate,  is  not  yet  ex- 
tinct. She  has  preserved  her  kind  and  may  still 
be  found  in  great  numbers  in  localities  and 
among  peoples  not  yet  reached  by  the  good  in- 
fluence of  science  and  art  and  the  evil  influence 
of  book  learning  that  is  not  science. 

Now  at  the  weaning  time  in  the  case  of  any 
mother,  human  or  otherwise,  excepting  the  one 
that  is  artificialized  and  under  the  dominant 
spell  of  unscientific  learning,  the  baby  will 
gradually,  readily,  easily  and  eagerly  adopt  the 
diet  of  its  mother,  and  at  the  same  decreasing 
rate  of  consumption  will  it  taper  off  on  milk,  of 
which  the  natural  supply  will  also  decrease  at  the 
same  rate.  It  is  not  merely  a  rule  without  ex- 
ception, it  is  a  law  of  Nature  that  the  baby 
adopts  the  diet  of  its  mother  when  it  stops  milk. 
Simple  as  this  is,  universally  and  intuitively 
executed  as  this  law  is  by  the  illiterate  mothers, 
the  educated  woman  wants  to  be  informed 
definitely  what  specific  foods  she  may  give  the 
baby. 

Limiting  her  selections  to  within  the  range  of 
such  materials  as  are  human  foods  naturally, 
fresh  or  in  a  good  state  of  preservation,  the 
mother  may  give  the  baby  anything  and  every- 
thing it  wants  and  all  it  wants.  To  find  out 
what  a  baby  wants,  we  would  naturally  begin 

76 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

with  the  most  "repeatable"  foods,  those  that  en- 
ter oftenest  into  the  diet  of  any  race,  especially 
in  climates  like  ours.  Accordingly  we  try  beef, 
rice  and  potatoes  to  begin  with.  To  ask  a  baby 
if  it  wants  a  particular  food,  put  the  food  to  its 
lips;  if  it  wants  food  at  all,  it  will  first  taste 
what  is  offered;  if  the  baby  does  not  want  the 
food,  it  will  turn  its  head  away;  if  it  does  want 
the  food,  it  will  grab  it  and  may  take  much 
more  then  and  there.  It  is  extremely  unlikely 
that  the  baby  will  refuse  scraped  beef,  or  rice  or 
potato.  Further  tests  are  very  likely  to  prove 
that  the  baby  is  an  omnivorous  animal. 

The  subconscious  mind  is  sometimes  alluded 
to  as  nature, "  nature  of  the  animal."  We  believe 
this  little  nature  of  the  animal  is  a  part  and 
product  of  great  Nature  and  that  the  small 
nature  is  consistent  with  great  Nature,  and  that 
whatever  the  nature  of  the  animal  accepts  from 
the  Nature  of  Mother  Earth  will  be  strictly 
proper  in  all  respects  of  quantity  and  quality, 
if  only  the  food  be  in  the  same  simple  state  in 
which  great  Nature  produced  it  and  not  artifi- 
cially tampered  with  more  than  to  cook  it  and 
reduce  it  to  an  eatable  condition.  The  baby  has 
an  inerrant  subconscious  mind;  it  recognizes  the 
complex  food  products  of  Nature,  but  it  is  not 
competent  to  take  cognizance  of  complex  artifi- 
cial mixtures  and  conglomerations.  We  will  add 

77 


Messages  to  Mothers 


salt  to  its  foods  just  as  we  do  to  ours,  that  is 
natural.  We  may  give  lean  and  fat  meats  mixed, 
nature  supplies  them  so,  and  we  may  mix  fats  in 
small  quantities  with  starches  in  large  quanti- 
ties. The  gastric  intelligence  demands  these 
simple  combinations,  and  experience  proves  that 
such  demand  is  rightly  interpreted.  We  may 
also  mix  sugar  with  some  foods  to  that  indefinite 
extent  which  is  most  easily  defined  by  saying  to 
suit  the  taste — the  taste  that  is  not  involved  in 
any  bad  habits. 

When  it  is  found  that  the  baby  so  heartily 
and  eagerly  eats  potatoes,  rice  and  pastes  or 
gruels  made  from  other  cereals,  as  to  convey  the 
impression  that  it  considers  them  very  good, 
there  can  be  no  motive  for  trying  to  make  them 
taste  better  or  to  make  the  baby  like  them  bet- 
ter, and  therefore  no  motive  for  adding  sugar. 
We  all  need  sugar  and  we  get  it  in  many  foods, 
and  the  baby  will  get  as  much  as  the  primitive 
baby  got  before  sugar  was  presented  to  us  in  the 
artificial  condition  of  isolated  purity.  We  get 
sugar  in  so  many  foods  naturally,  and  in  such 
large  quantities  in  some  of  them  —  dates,  figs, 
raisins,  prunes  and  all  sweet  fruits — that  the 
artificially  separated  sugar  does  not  seem  to  be 
necessary.  While  I  cannot  and  do  not  wish  to 
say  anything  against  the  moderate  use  of  isolated 
sugar,  I  do  not  believe  that  it  is  at  all  necessary, 

78 


Ills  of  the  Weaning1  Period 

and  I  can  certainly  point  to  examples  showing 
that  much  harm  has  resulted  to  some  people 
from  the  habitual,  indiscriminate  and  too  oft- 
repeated  use  of  sugar. 

We  will  not  mix  milk  or  cream  with  the 
baby's  food,  now  that  it  is  in  the  process  of  ab- 
staining from  milk;  and  we  will  not  mix  butter 
with  its  food,  because  that  is  an  impure  fat  con- 
taining from  one  to  two  per  cent  of  decompos- 
ing curd  which  makes  the  butter  a  stale  fat. 
The  gastric  intelligence  has  a  repugnance  to 
stale  things  generally  and  can  take  cognizance 
of  a  degree  of  staleness  so  slight  as  to  escape  the 
scrutiny  of  the  conscious  mind  as  represented  by 
the  sense  of  taste. 

When  weaning  begins,  water  is  to  be  the 
baby's  drink,  warm  water  in  cool  weather  and 
cool  water  in  warm  weather;  between  these  two 
it  will  not  be  hard  to  find  which  the  baby  pre- 
fers; that  which  it  chooses  will  be  best  for  it. 
If  the  baby  does  not  want  milk  we  soon  find 
that  out  and  it  is  quite  certain  then  that  it  does 
not  need  milk;  for,  if  it  needed  milk,  it  cer- 
tainly would  want  it  and  would  take  it.  The 
baby  will  do  its  own  choosing  of  foods  from  the 
various  items  that  may  be  presented  to  it  for 
selection.  Even  if  we  could  influence  it  and  pur- 
suade  it  to  eat  and  drink  according  to  our  selec- 
tion, the  baby's  stomach  would  not  always  agree 

79 


Messages  to  Mothers 


on  the  choice  of  the  mind  of  another.  The 
stomach  is  governed  entirely  by  the  baby's  own 
subconscious  mind,  and  that  is  an  intelligence 
that  insists  on  minding  its  own  business  and  is 
uncompromising  in  matters  of  food  selection. 

The  baby  may  have  yet  no  conscious  mind, 
may  not  be  a  knowing  and  reasoning  creature, 
but  it  is  possessed  of  an  inerrant  nature  that  is 
alive,  awake  and  on  duty  and  will  make  no  mis- 
takes so  long  as  it  has  only  to  deal  with  what  is 
natural  and  not  artificial.  It  will  be  useless  to 
discuss  the  ideal  character  of  milk  as  a  food,  if 
the  baby  does  not  want  it,  turns  from  it  and  re- 
fuses it  when  offered.  The  baby  may  by  the  al- 
ternative penalty  of  hunger  and  thirst  be  forced 
into  taking  milk,  but  the  stomach  cannot  be 
forced  into  digesting  it,  nor  even  to  supply  the 
gastric  juice  to  sterilize  it  and  save  it  from  putre- 
faction. Some  wise  infant  stomachs  will  send 
the  milk  right  up  again,  others  retain  it  to  spoil 
into  sickening,  irritating,  poisonous  and  purga- 
tive decomposition  products,  that  are  as  different 
from  milk  as  a  very  bad  egg  is  from  a  fresh 
one. 

To  continue  the  enforced  use  of  milk  means 
to  continue  suffering  from  the  illness  caused  by 
its  decomposition  in  a  stomach  that  can,  of 
course,  but  will  not  digest  it  nor  even  sterilize  it. 
That  a  child's  stomach  which  has  all  along 

80 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

digested  milk,  now  refuses  it,  but  will  digest 
beef,  potatoes,  rice  and  a  dozen  other  foods,  is 
proof  of  the  presence  of  intelligence  in  the 
stomach's  operations,  and  we  have  other  evidence 
of  the  existence  of  this  consistent  intelligence 
which  is  simply  a  part  of  great  Nature  which  it 
is  not  only  useless  but  fatal  to  antagonize  per- 
sistently. 

There  die  in  California  160  children  per 
month,  under  five  years  of  age,  from  preventable 
diseases.  In  New  York  City  just  prior  to  1896, 
when  the  population  was  very  nearly  the  same 
as  it  was  in  California  in  1900,  there  occurred  an 
average  of  258  deaths  per  month,  of  children 
under  five  years  of  age,  or  an  average  of  3,104 
per  year  for  ten  years,  from  diarrheal  diseases 
alone.  In  New  York  City  on  January  17,  1907, 
William  Mills  said  to  the  Woman's  Municipal 
League:  "While  you  are  sitting  here  many 
mothers  in  this  city  are  watching  anxiously  over 
babies  who  will  die  before  tomorrow's  dawn,  for 
the  infantile  death  rate  in  this  city  is  72  a  day, 
or  over  26,000  a  year.  To  every  1,000  children 
born  in  this  city  in  the  past  year  there  were  233 
deaths  of  infants."  The  Premier  of  England  is 
reported  to  have  said,  December  29,  1906,  that 
they  could  "hardly  look  the  world  in  the  face 
after  recognizing  that  120,000  babies  died  last 
year  in  England  and  Wales."  In  this  the 

81 


Messages  to  Mothers 


Premier  sees  deterioration  of  the  race,  even  the 
unfitting  of  the  fittest. 

Of  this  child  mortality  the  California  State 
Board  of  Health  estimated  (1904)  that  80  per 
cent  is  due  to  preventable  diseases.  It  will,  no 
doubt,  be  correct  to  assume  that  80  per  cent  of 
the  extraordinary  child  mortality  that  we  read 
of  elsewhere  will  also  be  due  to  preventable 
diseases.  When  diseases  generally,  or  rather  their 
causes,  come  to  be  understood,  a  still  larger  share 
of  them  will  be  found  to  belong  to  the  preventa- 
ble division,  and  it  will  then  be  seen  that  it  is 
far  too  low  an  estimate  that  reckons  only  80  per 
cent  of  this  child  mortality  as  being  due  to  pre- 
ventable diseases. 

These  preventable  diseases  prove  to  be  not 
diseases  at  all,  but  merely  disorders  of  digestion. 
The  patient  would  generally  recover  in  twenty- 
four  to  forty-eight  hours  if  the  one  or  two  errors 
of  diet  were  corrected.  Not  all  the  victims  of 
these  digestive  disorders  die.  To  make  a  conser- 
vative guess,  I  should  say  that  the  number  of 
new  cases  of  illness  each  month  is  at  least  three 
times  the  number  of  deaths.  The  former  in  Cali- 
fornia would  be  480.  We  may  say  there  are  500 
new  cases  every  month  of  children  under  five 
years  of  age  who  get  sick  from  these  functional 
disorders;  160  die,  some  recover;  a  very  large  per- 
centage do  not  recover,  but  continue  to  have 

82 


Ills  of  the  Weaning1  Period 

trouble  with  stomach  or  bowel,  with  resulting 
defects  of  development  of  body  and  mind  in 
many  cases.  Many  men  and  women  will  admit 
having  had  trouble  of  this  kind  ever  since  they 
can  remember.  So  prevalent  are  these  disorders 
that  the  well  man  or  woman  seems  to  be  the  ex- 
ception, and  we  are  often  reminded  that  we  are  a 
nation  of  dyspeptics. 

They  are  not  much  better  off  in  any  other  en- 
lightened country  where  child  life  is  influenced 
by  the  false  light  of  unscientific  and  erroneous 
medical  learning  to  the  disparagement  of  experi- 
ence and  the  natural,  inherited,  inerrant,  mater- 
nal knowledge  of  mothers.  At  the  bottom  of 
the  trouble  is  the  artificial  element  in  the  feed- 
ing of  the  baby.  If  we  were  deprived  only  of 
what  we  like,  we  would  still  enjoy  good  health, 
but  to  be  deprived  of  what  we  need,  is  not  com- 
patible with  health,  growth,  development  and 
usefulness.  If  a  baby  does  not  get  what  it  needs, 
as  called  for  by  its  wants,  we  cannot  expect  it  to 
remain  well  and  happy,  and  grow. 

The  cause  of  these  preventable  ills  of  infants 
at  the  weaning  time  is  that  they  are  forced  to 
continue  what  they  no  longer  need  nor  want  and 
are  not  given  what  they  do  need  and  want.  The 
transition  from  milk  to  solid  diet  is  too  long  de- 
ferred; it  is  one  of  those  inconveniences  that 
women  are  inclined  to  put  off  till  tomorrow. 

83 


Messages  to  Mothers 


And  then,  having  imbibed  a  few  artificial  ideas 
on  the  subject,  mothers  are  afraid  to  make  the 
transition,  fearing  that  some  evils  and  dangers 
are  associated  with  this  change  of  life  in  the 
baby's  case.  But,  while  this  partial  starvation 
for  a  month  or  two  would  not  kill  the  baby,  it 
prepares  the  way  for  ills  that  may  kill  it,  or  pre- 
pares the  occasion  for  calling  the  doctor,  in 
which  event  the  conduct  of  the  patient  is  gener- 
ally still  farther  removed  from  the  safe  and  nat- 
ural to  the  dangerous  and  artificial  way  of  doing 
things  in  such  cases. 

In  the  current  folk-lore  of  almost  any  com- 
munity there  are  conspicuous  examples  of  chil- 
dren and  adults  who  were  dangerously  ill,  but 
who  got  well  by  getting  what  they  wanted.  To 
allow  the  baby  freedom  of  selection  means  also 
freedom  of  rejection;  it  must  therefore  be 
allowed  to  stop  milk  absolutely  if  it  wants  to; 
which  means  that  milk  and  cream  must  not  be 
conglomerated  with  any  other  foods  that  the 
baby  chooses.  The  stomach  will  not  agree  on  the 
milk,  no  matter  how  small  the  quantity,  even  if 
it  is  fresh,  or  sterilized,  and  will  either  send  it  up 
or  let  it  rot,  and  the  spoiling  mess  will  serve  as 
cause  of  illness.  Let  us  remember  that  the  baby 
is  natural,  its  needs  and  wants  are  natural  and 
are  therefore  to  be  supplied  by  natural  objects, 
not  artificial.  Nature  makes  complicated  mix- 

84 


Ills  of  the  Weaning-  Period 

tures  for  us,  but  they  are  good  because  Nature 
made  them  and  we  find  that  we  have  no  gastric 
troubles  on  their  account.  But,  if  by  the  help 
of  our  own  learned  minds  we  make  complicated 
mixtures  and  conglomerations  for  our  stomachs, 
they  will  be  artificial.  Experience  teaches  that 
many  people  have  much  trouble  with  artificial 
conglomerations. 

The  one  great  mistake  that  will  account  for 
these  infantile  digestive  disorders  that  kill  so 
many  thousands  of  babies  annually  in  the  so- 
called  civilized  countries  only,  is  the  persistence 
of  milk  in  the  diet  of  children  long  after  the 
subconscious  mind  has  resolved  to  quit  it.  Not 
only  is  milk  used  daily,  but  several  times  daily; 
not  only  as  the  child's  drink,  but  as  a  constituent 
of  every  mess  of  food  that  is  conglomerated  for 
it.  That  many  children  keep  well  and  subsist 
partly  on  milk,  simply  proves  that  milk  is  proper 
for  them,  or  that  they  are  keeping  well  in  spite 
of  milk.  But  we  are  considering  the  multitude 
of  cases  in  which  it  is  not  right,  in  which  we  do 
not  succeed  with  the  oft-repeated  use  of  milk 
after  their  mother's  natural  supply  for  them  has 
ceased  and  should  be  interpreted  as  meaning 
that  the  baby  should  then  stop  milk  also. 

Instead  of  stopping  the  use  of  milk,  as  the 
subconscious  mind  wishes  to,  as  great  Nature  de- 
signed and  arranged  it  should,  we  resort  to  the 

85 


Messages  to  Mothers 


artificial  contrivance  known  as  the  dairy.  We 
talk  of  milk  being  an  ideally  perfect  food,  but 
that  is  true  only  within  the  limits  of  the  nursing 
period.  Milk  ceases  to  be  a  perfect  food  when 
the  baby  refuses  it  and  its  stomach  refuses  to 
digest  it.  The  very  idea  of  killing  a  calf  to  get 
its  mother's  milk  is  repugnant  to  us,  and  this 
repugnance  is  proof  enough  that  the  unnatural 
procedure  is  wrong  however  we  engage  our  rea- 
son to  reconcile  us  to  the  practice.  I  have  abso- 
lute confidence  in  the  subconscious  intelligence 
of  the  small  boy  who  felt  such  a  repugnance  to 
milk  that  he  could  not  be  induced  to  take  any 
after  his  mother  had  on  her  doctor's  advice 
taken  him  to  the  country  for  the  sake  of  getting 
fresh  milk  for  him.  He  saw  the  source  of  it,  and 
naturally,  spontaneously  and  uncompromisingly 
decided  against  milk  as  an  article  of  diet  for  him. 
But  supposing  we  consent  to  the  dairy  so  long 
as  its  repugnant  features  are  beyond  our  imme- 
diate view,  the  unnatural  contrivance  embraces 
the  still  further  unnatural  detail  of  getting  milk 
from  an  animal  in  one  part  of  the  country  and 
delivering  it  to  another  animal  in  another  part 
of  the  country.  The  distance  varies  from  a  few 
yards  to  hundreds  of  miles;  the  time  varies 
from  a  few  minutes  to  twelve  or  more  hours. 
How  unnatural  this  is  may  be  more  easily  seen 
or  imagined  than  explained.  Milk  is  a  very  un- 

86 


Ills  of  the  Weaning:  Period 

stable  combination,  an  exceedingly  perishable 
stuff,  and  after  the  long  time  in  transit,  the  ex- 
posure to  air  as  it  is  trundled  hastily  along  on 
wagon,  on  train  and  again  on  wagon,  the  ever 
and  abundantly  present  microbian  life  of  the 
barnyard  and  the  city,  and  along  the  line  be- 
tween, is  thoroughly  rubbed,  beaten  and  churned 
into  the  milk.  In  the  natural  way  of  taking  it, 
milk  is  not  exposed  to  air  or  to  microbian  life  at 
all. 

There  is  in  a  city  no  such  thing  as  fresh  milk 
from  a  dairy.  It  may  seem  good  to  the  taste, 
may  pass  the  health-office  test,  but  it  is  a  stale 
article,  and  the  fine  gastric  intelligence  of  your 
bright  little  Jack  McCormicks  is  not  going  to  be 
fooled  by  it  many  times.  We  are  informed  that 
the  milk  can  be  got  to  destination  in  a  perfectly 
good  state  of  preservation,  that  the  chemist  has 
supplied  the  means;  but  it  is  not  so.  Time  and 
transit  have  changed  the  milk;  the  reasoning 
mind  may  not  see  it,  but  again  it  will  not  fool 
the  stomach  of  your  highly  sensitive  baby  who 
in  these  times  is  likely  to  be  all  the  worse  for 
having  descended  through  several  highly  artifi- 
cialized  generations.  Let  us  suppose  that  the 
milk  during  transportation  does  remain  in  statu 
quo  under  the  influence  of  a  substance  that  is 
paralyzing  to  microbian  life.  That  substance  is 
not  a  food,  but  it  is  not  an  inert  substance  either, 

87 


Messages  to  Mothers 


else  it  would  be  ineffective  against  the  microbe. 
The  amount  of  it  that  one  gets  in  his  daily  al- 
lowance of  milk  is  harmlessly  small,  we  are 
told.  We  may  actually  take  this  stuff  in  these 
small  quantities,  try  it  and  demonstrate  the 
harmless  character  of  it.  And  yet,  the  alleged 
demonstrated  harmless  character  of  any  stuff  of 
this  class  put  to  such  use  is  not  a  fact.  I  do  not 
doubt  that  interested  parties  mean  well,  and  it 
may  be  admitted  that  this  stuff  in  these  small 
quantities  is  harmless  in  ninety-nine  cases  in  a 
hundred;  but  if  it  is  bad  for  one  in  a  hundred 
it  is  bad  for  the  community,  and  the  aggregate 
evil  to  the  State  must  be  great.  These  preserva- 
tive stuffs  may  by  actual  single  test  prove  to  be 
harmless  to  a  thousand  people  and  yet  not  bear 
repeated  use  several  times  daily  without  cumu- 
lative harm,  resulting  in  illness  which  is  easily 
named,  but  for  which  no  cause  is  intelligibly 
assigned. 

The  stony  seeds  of  cherries  and  of  plums 
never  hurt  anybody  when  swallowed.  A  small 
boy  swallowed  a  silver  quarter;  his  mother 
rushed  him  to  the  doctor,  related  the  fact  and 
asked  the  doctor  if  it  would  pass.  The  doctor 
replied  that  if  it  was  good  it  would  pass.  While 
stomachs,  especially  those  of  small  boys,  too 
easily  accept  large  seeds  and  small  coins,  some 
people  cannot  force  themselves  to  swallow  a  pill. 

88 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

So  it  appears  that  even  the  gullet  possesses  some 
discriminating  intelligence.  There  are  other  ex- 
amples to  that  effect,  and  we  should  think  it 
would  and  should  possess  such  discriminating  in- 
telligence, for,  if  the  stomach  objects  to  a  thing, 
it  would  seem  proper  to  stop  it  at  the  point 
where  it  begins  to  start  on  its  way  there. 

I  suppose  it  is  generally  known  what  happens 
to  many  of  us  when  a  fly  gets  into  our  stomachs. 
We  are  aware  of  a  strong  feeling  of  repugnance 
to  flies.  That  a  dead,  inert  and  harmless  fly  gets 
into  the  stomach  is  purely  accidental  and  against 
such  precautions  as  to  make  the  event  entirely 
unsuspected,  and,  when  the  circumstances  a 
minute  or  so  later  compel  us  to  suspect  such  a 
thing,  it  is  hard  to  believe  that  it  could  have 
happened.  But  it  has  happened  and  just  often 
enough  to  furnish  proof  and  confirmation  of 
proof  that  the  stomach  can,  and  that  some 
stomachs  always,  have  a  very  strong  repugnance 
to  flies,  and  that,  although  the  person  does  not 
know  a  fly  has  got  into  his  stomach,  the  stomach 
does  know  it,  takes  cognizance  of  its  presence, 
stops  its  normal  procedures,  calls  to  its  aid  all  the 
many  muscles  employed  in  emesis  and  sends  up 
everything  in  the  stomach  just  to  get  the  fly  up. 
This  is  not  a  pleasant  detail  of  our  study,  but  it 
is  of  great  utilitarian  interest.  Along  with  simi- 
lar experiences  involving  other  objects,  it  proves 

89 


Messages  to  Mothers 


the  existence  of  a  gastric  intelligence  that  has 
dislikes  as  well  as  likes,  that  can  refuse  as  well  as 
choose,  that  can  order  a  strike  and  refuse  to 
handle  the  usual  material  when  an  objectionable 
item,  however  small  and  harmless  in  itself,  is 
present. 

You  can  fool  the  erring  conscious  mind  but 
you  cannot  fool  the  unerring  subconscious  mind 
of  which  the  gastric  intelligence  is  the  faculty 
that  attends  to  selection  and  digestion  of  foods. 
You  can  fool  the  palate  with  materials  that  are 
not  natural  foods,  but  you  cannot  fool  the 
stomach,  and,  if  in  addition  to  the  dyspeptic 
reader's  own  experience  further  proof  were 
needed,  enough  other  examples  to  that  effect 
could  be  supplied.  Nor  do  we  fool  the  subcon- 
scious intelligence  with  drugs  for  keeping  milk 
sweet  and  for  preserving  fruits,  vegetables,  meats, 
beverages  and  for  coloring  butter.  The  stomach 
may  not  take  cognizance,  so  far  as  one  may 
know,  of  the  first  few  times  that  such  unnatural 
things  enter  it,  but  many  stomachs  will  not  en- 
dure repetition  of  the  trick. 

As  an  example  of  artificially  modified  food 
that  is  capable  of  disabling  an  army  more  than 
the  powder  and  lead  of  the  enemy,  we  may  con- 
sider beef  from  which  an  extract  has  been  taken. 
An  advertisement  actually  tells  us  that  the  ex- 
tract is  pleasant  to  the  taste.  No  doubt  about 

90 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

that,  but  the  meat  is  deprived  of  its  pleasant 
taste  and  anybody  can  easily  detect  the  fraud. 
Soldiers  and  other  mastered  men  will  obediently 
eat  it  in  response  to  orders,  but  their  stomachs  do 
not  recognize  and  do  not  submit  to  the  superior 
authority  of  the  commissary  department,  which 
does  not  yet  know  that,  whereas  each  one  has 
mind  of  his  own  and  must  mind  his  own  busi- 
ness, the  mind  of  one,  the  superior,  cannot  govern 
the  bodily  functions  of  another,  the  inferior.  If 
the  meat  of  an  army  be  for  weeks  limited  ex- 
clusively to  such  as  will  have  no  other  fault  than 
that  it  is  robbed  of  such  constituents  as  the  ex- 
tracted juice  will  carry  away,  then  the  army  will 
meet  as  bad  a  fate  as  its  worst  enemy  could  wish. 
Such  meat  is  not  "  repeatable  " ;  the  men  do  not 
want  it,  do  not  like  it,  and  their  stomachs  do  not 
agree  on  its  selection  and  will  not  digest  it. 

Under  the  influence  of  learning,  that  is  not 
science,  there  is  and  has  been  a  general  disregard 
of  the  authority  of  the  subconscious  mind  in 
matters  of  its  own  concern.  Patients  have  been 
and  are  given  medicines  that  they  do  not  want 
and  are  denied  foods  that  they  do  want.  That  is 
the  way  patients  are  killed.  Nearly  all  of  the 
prostrated  dysentery  patients  of  the  Spanish- 
American  war  in  the  Philippines  were  killed 
that  way.  Faults  of  the  rations  made  them  sick 
and  the  treatment  killed  them.  The  merit  of  the 

91 


Messages  to  Mothers 


so-called  Christian  Science  method  of  treating 
the  sick  consists  in  allowing  the  subconscious 
mind  to  have  its  own  way  in  its  own  affairs. 
Medicines  and  spoon  victuals  not  wanted  are  not 
taken;  the  food,  the  rest  and  the  quiet  consola- 
tion that  are  wanted  are  received.  The  source  of 
harm  is  eliminated,  power  is  supplied  by  the 
foods  or  the  fat  of  the  patient,  and  with  it  the 
subconscious  mind  of  the  patient,  and  nothing  else 
performs  the  miracle  of  restoration.  The  name 
is  new  but  not  the  method,  which  is  the  same  as 
has  always  prevailed  among  the  illiterate  poor 
who  look  upon  a  doctor  as  a  luxury  only  for  the 
rich. 

Unsound  brain  in  unsound  body  is  the  way  an 
ancient  saying  might  read.  Conscious  mind  is 
incapacitated  by  illness  which  involves  the  brain 
with  the  body  in  general.  Even  a  sick  doctor 
calls  in  a  physician;  just  as  well,  since  conscious 
mind  has  no  business  with  the  physical  disorder. 
But  the  subconscious  mind  is  not  affected  by  the 
illness,  and  is  just  as  competent  as  ever,  and  it  is 
its  function  to  direct  the  disordered  affairs  of  the 
body  and  accomplish  the  restoration. 

Neither  the  mother  nor  the  doctor  can  choose 
for  and  dictate  what  the  child  is  to  eat.  The 
child  is  a  perfectly  equipped  organism  with  per- 
fected mind  of  its  own,  even  if  it  be  subcon- 
scious, so  constituted  that  it  can  and  must  mind 

92 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

its  own  business  of  its  own  bodily  fun6lions  of 
selection,  rejection,  etc.  It  is  therefore  extremely 
foolish  and  fatally  wrong  to  thousands  and  ruin- 
ous to  tens  of  thousands  of  babies  annually  to 
interfere  with  their  own  function  of  rejecting 
milk  and  accepting  other  foods  when  they  want 
to  do  so.  To  partially  starve  the  baby,  by  refus- 
ing it  what  it  wants,  is  the  lesser  evil.  The  one 
great  and  fatal  error  is  to  insist  on  continuing 
milk  as  a  drink  and  as  an  adjunct  to  nearly 
everything  it  eats,  when  the  indications  clearly 
show  that  the  baby  does  not  want  milk  in  any 
way  whatever.  Many  children  are  found  to  be 
taking  milk,  as  such  and  as  a  constituent  of 
mixtures,  as  a  matter  of  obedience, — the  parents 
imposing  the  same  because  they  ought  to,  ac- 
cording to  the  consensus  of  opinion  that  is 
most  learned  and  therefore  most  entitled  to  re- 
spe6l.  The  children  thus  acquire  the  habit  of 
taking  what  is  given,  not  calling  for  what  they 
want,  having  found  that  useless. 

The  child's  stomach  in  many  such  cases  not 
only  refuses  to  digest  the  milk  or  the  mixture, 
but  even  refuses  to  supply  the  gastric  juice  to 
sterilize  it  and  save  it  from  spoiling.  Thus  we 
have  digestive  disorder,  illness  of  many,  deaths 
of  some.  And  if  death  does  not  occur  till 
nearly  five  years  of  age,  it  is  nevertheless  due 
to  the  disorder  that  will  almost  certainly  be 

93 


Messages  to  Mothers 


found  to  have  had  its  inception  at  the  wean- 
ing time. 

We  are  not  concerned  with  the  whole  popula- 
tion; we  are  interested  in  the  health  of  the 
babies  who  obje6l  to  the  arbitrary  forcing  of 
milk  upon  them.  These  make  up  a  very  large 
sum  in  the  aggregate,  and  those  that  suffer  and 
die  are  of  much  concern  to  all  the  rest  of  the 
community.  The  great  number  of  deaths,  the 
still  greater  number  of  chronically  dyspeptic 
survivors,  mean  danger  to  young  children,  and  no 
one  knows  where  the  selections  of  the  grim 
Reaper  will  fall  next.  That  the  harvest  of  disease 
and  death  is  preventable,  or  even  reducible, 
makes  the  matter  worth  while  as  an  object  of 
study  and  action  and  is  our  motive  for  doing  so 
and  our  apology  for  agitation. 

It  is  a  law  of  all  mammal  nature  that  at  the 
weaning  time  the  use  of  milk  ceases.  The  en- 
lightened human  mother  arbitrarily  makes  an 
exception  and  violates  that  law  with  the  result 
that  many  die  and  a  much  larger  number  are 
poisoned  into  a  state  of  ill  health,  ill  nature  and 
incompetence,  the  evil  of  all  which  radiates  to 
and  affe6ts  society  about  them. 

The  Health  Authorities  blame  not  the  dairy 
itself,  but  the  unclean  and  fraudulent  methods  of 
it,  for  all  the  ills  and  deaths  associated  with  the 
consumption  of  milk.  Those  authorities  want 

94 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

the  legislative  bodies  to  prescribe  more  law  for 
the  regulation  of  dairies.  The  Rockefeller  In- 
stitute of  Medical  Research  believes  these  ills 
and  deaths  are  due  to  a  microbe  and  is  looking 
for  it;  but  now,  1908,  in  the  sixth  year  of  its 
search,  has  not  yet  found  the  right  one. 

In  the  home  and  presence  of  the  patient  will 
be  seen  the  erroneous  feeding  that  I  have  writ- 
ten of,  the  plainly  evident  repugnance  to  milk 
which  the  patient  is  nevertheless  forced  to  take. 
However  fresh,  clean  and  pure  the  milk  may  be, 
the  repugnance  is  there  just  the  same.  The  item 
of  filth  being  eliminated,  the  illness  still  persists. 
It  will  also  be  seen  in  the  home  that  the  child  will 
recover  if  milk  is  eliminated  absolutely  from  its 
diet,  proving  that  milk  is  the  cause.  The  stomach 
does  not  digest  what  it  does  not  want.  These 
same  facts  must,  of  course,  exclude  the  microbe 
as  the  cause  of  the  illness.  If  such  a  fatal 
microbe  were  colonized  in  the  digestive  appa- 
ratus of  the  child,  it  would  be  absurd  to  suppose 
that  it  could  be  extinguished  by  simply  elimi- 
nating milk. 

The  rather  artificial  health  authorities  are  not 
able  to  transmute  their  legislative  ideas  into 
action;  so  much  the  better  for  the  still  some- 
what natural  common  people;  and  the  Rocke- 
feller Institute  of  Medical  Research  is  not  mak- 
ing any  progress  in  this  line  either,  so  far  as  the 

95 


Messages  to  Mothers 


public  is  aware.  What  we  offer  in  this  important 
matter  of  Jack  McCormick's  Disease,  is  by  this 
time  understood,  and  we  want  it  understood  that 
our  method  of  prevention  and  cure  is  a  great 
success  and  consists  only  in  eliminating  what  is 
artificial  and  restoring  what  is  natural  in  baby 
feeding. 

In  China  and  Japan  the  baby  gets  no  milk 
after  weaning.  In  these  countries  there  is  no  ex- 
traordinary infant  mortality.  In  China,  milk 
from  a  dairy  is  popularly  believed  to  be  poison- 
ous, and  it  is  not  considered  safe  to  use  it.  When 
the  Chinese  venture  to  use  it  at  all,  it  is  only 
during  cold  weather.  Of  course,  I  agree  that 
their  belief  is  thoroughly  well  founded.  How 
much  more  experience  do  we  need  to  teach  us 
the  same  lesson?  Japanese  children,  as  seen  out- 
of-doors  in  Japan,  appear  physically  and  morally 
better  and  happier  than  the  children  of  any 
otherwise  civilized  country  in  the  world.  When 
the  Japanese  baby  is  weaned  it  eats  what  its  par- 
ents eat,  so  far  as  such  things  can  be  reduced  to 
an  eatable  condition  for  a  baby.  The  Chinese 
and  Japanese  have  no  regular  dairies  and  there- 
fore no  regular  delivery  of  milk.  But  they  are 
likely  to  follow  bad  examples  and  try  the  dairy. 
Already  in  Japan  an  occasional  family  has  its 
cow,  and  imported  condensed  milk  can  be  bought 
in  the  more  important  towns.  In  their  innocence 

96 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

and  with  faith  in  the  white  man,  they  employ 
milk,  when  obtainable,  as  an  article  of  diet  in 
cases  of  sickness.  Of  course,  many  patients  both 
here  and  there  recover  in  spite  of  milk,  but  milk 
also  kills  many  an  adult  as  well  as  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  children.  In  comparison  with  the  dairy, 
the  brewery  and  the  distillery  are  very  innocent 
institutions.  The  Japanese  are  teaching  us  by 
example  how  to  feed  armies.  They  also  prove  by 
example  that  I  am  right  in  placing  milk  out  of 
season  and  mortality  out  of  season  in  the  rela- 
tion of  cause  and  effect. 

I  am  supposed  to  have  been  writing  about  the 
preventable  ills  of  the  weaning  period.  The 
group  of  ills  consists  primarily  of  a  simple 
digestive  disorder  with  various  ills  of  various 
names  that  depend  on,  or  result  from,  the  initial 
digestive  disorder.  The  most  utilitarian  view  of 
the  group  is  to  regard  it  as  a  unit,  for  the  reason 
that  its  cause  is  a  unit;  namely,  the  refusal  of 
the  digestive  apparatus  to  digest  what  the  sub- 
conscious rnind  does  not  agree  on  choosing: 
milk  after  weaning,  all  the  worse  after  having 
been  transported  a  few  hundred  miles.  Of  these 
ills  themselves  I  have  said  nothing  and  mean  to 
say  nothing  more.  Beyond  the  cause,  the  study 
of  this  polynonimous  group  of  ills,  with  its  im- 
possible classification,  has  never  been  and  never 
can  be  of  any  utility.  The  enormous  death  rates, 

97 


Messages  to  Mothers 


in  our  country  in  general  and  in  our  cities  in 
particular,  of  children  under  five  years  of  age, 
from  confessedly  preventable  diseases,  prove  the 
ignorance  of  the  learned  ones  and  the  failure  of 
the  prevailing  methods  of  treatment  and  the 
learning  upon  which  they  are  based.  These  death 
rates  also  prove  the  dangerous  character  of  the 
authoritative  literature  that  instructs  physicians 
to  insist  on  over-confident  mothers  giving  their 
children  milk  against  their  children's  will  five 
times  daily  into  the  third  year  of  their  age  and 
to  continue  the  use  of  milk  still  far  beyond  that 
age.  The  luck  of  the  illiterate  proves  the  wis- 
dom and  the  superiority  of  the  subconscious 
mind  in  the  affair  of  food  selection  in  particular 
and  in  maternal  affairs  in  general. 

The  ills  that  I  am  writing  of  and  saying  so 
little  about  are  at  least  well  known  if  not  un- 
derstood. The  ills  themselves  do  not  need  to  be 
understood  for  any  utilitarian  reason.  They  do 
not  need  to  be  treated;  they  are  results  and 
there  is  no  utility  in  the  treatment  of  results  so 
long  as  causes  are  allowed  to  remain  in  constant 
operation.  For  neglecting  these  results,  which 
everywhere  else  receives  so  much  useless  attention 
and  fallacious  treatment,  the  reason  is  that  they 
are  self-limited  and  self-curable  disorders;  in 
other  words,  the  subconscious  mind  of  the  patient 
performs  the  cure,  if  only  the  conscious  mind  of 

98 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

the  dcxftor,  the  parent  or  guardian,  will  cease  to 
maintain  the  cause.  The  cause  is  the  only  thing 
that  need  concern  us  and  is  our  sole  object  of  at- 
tention. The  cure  is  to  be  left  to  the  patient's 
subconscious  mind  —  the  nature  of  the  animal  — 
which  is  part  of,  and  consistent  with,  great  Nature 
and  just  as  much  to  be  trusted.  The  only  im- 
portant question  concerning  these  ills  is  that  of 
their  cause.  I  have  supplied  the  answer  and 
shaped  it  into  the  form  of  instruction  with 
enough  varied  repetition  to  produce,  as  I  believe, 
an  impression. 

The  baby  is  unsophisticated  and  is  persistently 
true  to  Nature,  and  is  not  easily  diverted  to  the 
artificial  ways  of  existence  and  subsistence  that 
are  so  fatal  to  the  health  and  life  of  the  Nation. 
When  it  becomes  plainly  apparent  that  the  baby 
refuses  milk,  let  us  refrain  from  trying  modifi- 
cations of  milk,  or  other  sources  or  brands;  let 
it  be  understood  that  the  baby  does  not  want 
any  milk  whatever.  It  must  have  water  to  drink, 
and  milk  and  cream  must  now  be  excluded  ab- 
solutely from  all  its  foods.  The  baby  will  then 
need  and  therefore  want  and  like  such  natural 
foods,  fresh  or  in  a  good  state  of  preservation,  as 
its  parents  eat,  in  a  simple  and  unconglomerated 
state,  just  as  in  the  case  of  any  other  young 
mammal.  Selection  of  foods  for  a  baby  ceases 
to  be  a  problem,  or  source  of  trouble  or  anxiety, 

99 


Messages  to  Mothers 


when  the  baby  is  allowed  to  attend  to  it  him- 
self. Let  the  mother  offer  the  baby  at  meal 
times  and  at  other  times  such  as  there  is.  The 
baby,  if  it  wants  anything,  will  taste  everything 
and  will  turn  back  or  away  from  what  it  does 
not  want,  and  will  eagerly  grab  what  it  does 
want.  The  baby's  subconscious  mind  can  be  ab- 
solutely trusted  to  make  no  mistake  as  to  quality 
or  quantity  so  long  as  what  is  offered  is  not  af- 
fected artificially  by  conglomeration,  or  any 
other  unnatural  modification  except  cooking. 
The  subconscious  mind,  however,  cannot  be  relied 
on  to  judge  artificial  conglomerations  and  modi- 
fications of  foods.  The  baby  may  accept  them 
and  trouble  may  and  often  does  arise  from  their 
ingestion ;  if  not  from  a  first,  second  or  third 
taking,  trouble  is  extremely  likely  to  arise  after 
a  more  or  less  prolonged  repetition  of  the  more 
or  less  artificially  modified  food. 

The  cure  of  these  preventable  ills,  that  begin 
at  or  soon  after  the  weaning  period,  must  have 
already  become  plainly  apparent;  but  repetition 
is  an  essential  element  of  instruction  and  con- 
stitutes the  one  difference  between  telling  a  thing 
and  teaching  it.  I  am  not  to  be  understood  as 
encouraging  the  domestic  treatment  of  real 
disease,  nor  the  domestic  employment  of  drugs; 
but  these  preventable  ills  are  not  real  diseases, 
they  are  only  digestive  disorders  in  which  the 

100 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

only  danger  to  life  arises  from  faults  in  care  and 
treatment,  and  much  more  so  under  professional 
direction  than  under  the  intuitive  supervision  of 
the  natural,  unsophisticated  mother.  No  drugs 
are  involved,  and  the  case  and  management  of 
the  child,  even  though  sick  from  such  disorder, 
remain  properly  and  naturally  within  the 
mother's  natural  province,  and  should  remain 
there  so  long  as  the  medical  profession,  with  its 
prevailing  unnatural  and  fallacious  methods, 
continues  to  make  such  a  bad  record  of  fatal  re- 
sults of  treatment. 

Here  in  my  neighborhood  was  an  example  of 
spontaneous  recovery  of  a  baby  with  only  the 
ministrations  of  its  mother  after  two  physicians 
had  abandoned  it  as  having  no  hope  of  recovery. 
Both  the  doctors  and  the  mother  expelled  it  to 
die.  The  emergency  developed  the  heroine;  the 
mother  courageously  let  the  baby  alone  to  die  in 
peace,  attending  only  to  the  simple,  natural  de- 
tails of  care  for  the  baby's  comfort.  The  baby 
quickly  grew  better.  The  mother  relying  now 
only  on  her  inerrant  maternal  wisdom — the  ma- 
ternal subconscious  mind — did  only  what  that 
wisdom,  that  intelligence,  suggested;  all  which 
may  be  called  "nothing,"  but  it  was  just  the 
perfectly  natural  and  simple  way  of  caring  for 
a  sick  baby  with  only  digestive  disorder  and  no 
real  disease.  The  baby  was  let  alone  and  other- 

101 


Messages  to  Mothers 


wise  given  what  it  seemed  to  want  and  need,  and 
though  it  would  have  died  under  the  "  most  ad- 
vanced "  method  of  treatment,  it  got  well,  just 
as  many  an  educated  white  mother's  baby  in  our 
Southern  States  has  got  well  under  the  perfectly 
natural  ministrations  of  a  genuine,  unsophisti- 
cated, black  "mammy." 

Interested  parties  find  on  inquiry  that  what  a 
mother  has  done,  in  such  a  case  of  recovery,  con- 
sisted of  letting  the  child  alone  and  doing  noth- 
ing. In  the  condu6t  of  such  a  case  the  illiterate 
mother  succeeds  better  than  the  learned  mother; 
but  the  illiterate  mother  knows  nothing  of  the 
sciences  involved  in  the  case  of  her  sick  baby. 
Knowing  nothing,  how  could  she  make  any  rea- 
sonably intelligent  and  consistent  procedure?  The 
study  of  the  human  animal  and  its  liabilities  is 
practically  infinite,  and  the  little  we  know  of  the 
subject  adds  little  good  and,  by  misunderstand- 
ing and  misappropriation,  much  danger  to  our 
qualification  for  conducting  the  case  of  a  patient. 
The  illiterate  mother  well  knows  the  one  great 
fundamental  fact  under  the  circumstances  of  the 
bedside  of  the  patient;  that  is  the  fact  that  she 
knows  nothing  and  can  therefore  only  and  con- 
sistently do  nothing.  But  a  great  restoration 
takes  place  and  we  call  it  a  spontaneous  recovery. 
The  recovery  is,  however,  not  spontaneous;  a 
real,  living  and  knowing  agency  conducts  the 

102 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

restoration  of  order  out  of  disorder  and  employs 
power  and  material  for  the  purpose.  That 
knowing  agency  is  the  subconscious  mind  of  the 
patient,  even  if  it  is  a  baby.  The  material  was 
got,  while  it  was  not  eating,  from  its  own  tissues; 
the  power  was  got  from  its  own  stored  fuel.  The 
child  diminished  in  weight  while  the  restoration 
took  place;  the  loss  of  weight  represented  the 
fuel  material  that  was  decomposed  to  supply  the 
power  necessary  for  the  restoration. 

There  must  be  a  little  intelligence  in  the  little 
caterpillar  that  performs  the  wonderful  change 
of  organization  into  that  of  the  butterfly  with- 
out the  aid  of  any  external  intelligence.  Why 
should  we,  then,  have  any  trouble  in  believing 
that  the  subconscious  mind  can  perform  the 
restoration  of  order  out  of  disorder?  And  why 
should  we  not  trust  it  to  do  so  without  interfer- 
ence? It  is  only  the  people  that  are  affected  with 
learning,  and  with  a  disposition  to  misappro- 
priate it,  that  do  not  so  trust  in  this  little  detail 
of  Nature  to  mind  its  own  business.  It  may  not 
be  correct  to  say  it  is  intelligence  that  conducts 
these  changes,  but  the  principle  is  just  the  same 
whatever  we  call  it.  We  may  just  as  well  call  it 
a  form  of  energy,  correlated  with  all  other  forms 
of  energy.  I  believe  that  would  be  correct;  it  is 
easier  to  see  that  a  form  of  energy  could  trans- 
form an  egg  into  a  bird,  than  it  is  to  see  that  an 

103 


Messages  to  Mothers 


egg  has  intelligence  to  conduct  the  organization. 
Then,  also,  energy  would  be  the  fitter  word  to 
apply  to  the  case  of  the  organization  of  a  bud  or 
a  flower.  In  the  case  of  the  subconscious  mind, 
however,  I  would  adhere  to  the  word  and  the 
idea  of  intelligence,  admitting  that  intelligence 
may  be  really  a  form  of  energy,  and  that  edu- 
cation simply  improves  the  instrumentalities 
through  which  this  energy  operates. 

No  educated  conscious  mind  of  a  patient  him- 
self, or  of  a  physician,  is  in  any  sense  a  com- 
petitor of  the  subconscious  mind  of  the  patienf 
in  the  matter  of  his  restoration  to  that  physical 
integrity  called  health.  Therefore  we  should  let 
the  patient  alone  to  be  governed  by  his  feelings. 
That  is  the  patient's  wish,  unless  he  is  unduly 
influenced  by  learning  of  his  own.  He  has  sub- 
conscious mind  of  his  own  which  will  insist  on  at- 
tending to  all  those  affairs  of  the  body  that  are 
beyond  his  ken  and  to  the  restoration  of  order 
within  him.  Physical  disorder  is  utterly  beyond 
the  comprehension  of  the  most  learned  conscious 
mind,  whether  of  the  patient  or  the  physician. 
We  are  to  do  nothing  but  supply  what  the  sub- 
conscious mind  calls  for,  we  attend  only  to  the 
environment.  The  illiterate  woman  is  so  great  a 
success  as  a  mother  that  she  and  her  ways  might 
well  constitute  one  of  the  most  utilitarian  and 
vitally  important  nature  studies  for  the  family 

104 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

physician  whose  duty  it  must  often  be  to  turn 
learned  women  from  the  artificial  to  the  natural 
point  of  view  and  action  in  maternal  affairs. 
And  I  suggest  that  the  most  natural  and  there- 
fore the  best  objects  of  such  study  would  be 
found  among  the  thrifty  poor  outside  of  the 
United  States  of  America,  and  I  think  no- 
where could  better  examples  be  found  than  in 
Japan. 

We  are  not  looking  for  trouble  in  the  case  of 
the  child  who  is  happy.  If  it  is  not  happy  we 
are  very  willing  and  anxious  to  remove  the  cause 
of  its  unhappiness  and,  if  practicable,  should  do 
so  at  once,  for  it  is  bad  policy,  from  the  char- 
after  development  point  of  view,  to  allow  an 
unhappy  state  of  mind  to  persist  any  longer  than 
we  can  cut  it  short  by  supplying  natural  demands 
in  regard  to  food,  drink,  comfort  and  toys  or 
other  means  of  occupation. 

If  the  child's  trouble  amounts  to  more  than  a 
mere  unhappiness,  if  it  amounts  to  real  distress 
and  if  its  tongue  is  much  coated  and  the  color  of 
the  tongue  is  very  different  from  the  normal  pale 
red,  then  we  know  the  child  is  not  well.  The 
fact  of  its  distress  prompts  us  to  look  for  causes. 
We  first  investigate  as  to  the  condition  of  the 
bowel.  If  the  abdomen  is  tense,  tight  as  a  drum, 
unloading  of  the  rectum  has  been  neglected  and 
needs  to  be  attended  to  at  once.  This  can  gen- 

105 


Messages  to  Mothers 


erally  be  done  successfully  in  two  minutes  by 
injecting  into  the  reftum  a  very  little  common 
salt  solution,  brine.  Whether  the  brine  is  a  little 
stronger  or  weaker,  warm  or  cold,  makes  little 
difference;  whether  the  quantity  is  a  teaspoon- 
ful  or  a  quarter-teaspoonful  makes  little  differ- 
ence. A  little  brine  put  just  inside  of  the  re6lum 
is  almost  certain  to  cause  an  unloading  and  the 
expulsion  of  much  gas  inside  of  two  minutes. 
In  a  recently  neglected  case  where  the  material 
is  unduly  hard,  this  inje6lion  may  have  to  be  re- 
peated at  intervals  of  half  an  hour,  more  or  less. 
The  injection  should  be  made  with  an  eighth- 
ounce  hard  rubber  syringe  with  straight  tip,  and 
the  tip  should  be  lubricated  for  use. 

Instead  of  brine,  glycerin  will  do  even  better; 
a  half-teaspoonful  will  be  plenty  and  a  quarter- 
teaspoonful  will  be  enough  and  just  as  effective 
as  if  a  whole  teaspoonful  were  used.  For  a  baby 
five  drops  will  be  plenty.  The  instrument  only 
holds  a  teaspoonful.  In  using  glycerin  the  in- 
strument need  not  be  lubricated  by  other 
material.  One  slight  difficulty  with  glycerin  is 
that  the  caliber  of  the  nozzle  of  the  instrument 
is  too  small  to  admit  of  the  easy  flow  of  glycerin, 
which  is  of  a  syrupy  consistence,  especially  when 
fresh  and  cold.  Such  injedlions  are  very  success- 
ful; the  blockade  is,  with  rare  exceptions,  only 
in  the  reftum,  and  purgative  medicines  a6ling  all 

106 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

along  the  digestive  tra6l  are  unnecessary  as  well 
as  unnatural  and  possibly  harmful. 

The  constipation,  the  hard  condition  of  the 
material  in  the  bowel,  is  a  result,  and,  after  all, 
this  aiding  of  the  bowel  by  local  lubrication  and 
stimulation  is  merely  treating  a  result  and  car- 
ing for  an  emergency.  At  the  age  of  twelve 
months  and  for  a  year  or  two  later,  a  child  ought 
to  have  the  re<5lum  unloaded  twice  daily.  If  that 
does  not  occur  naturally,  it  will  be  easy  to  make 
it  occur  by  the  aid  of  a  little  brine  or  glycerin 
as  explained.  A  very  convenient  thing  to  know 
in  this  connection  is,  that  young  children  can 
easily  and  always  be  made  to  unload  the  reftum 
early  in  the  forenoon  when  it  is  proposed  to  take 
them  out  for  the  day,  on  a  journey  or  picnic  or 
visit,  and  they  will  then  cause  their  mother  no 
anxiety  on  this  matter  during  the  day  away  from 
home. 

To  cure  constipation  when  it  seems  to  be  the 
chief  trouble  the  child  has,  let  its  milk  be 
stopped  absolutely;  let  milk,  cream  and  butter 
be  eliminated  from  the  child's  diet.  It  has  passed 
the  weaning  stage  and  does  not  need  milk.  Even 
if  it  likes  milk,  the  liking  is  acquired  from  the 
habitual  use  of  milk,  its  selection  proceeds  from 
the  conscious  mind;  the  want  of  it  is  based  on 
the  like  of  it  and  not  on  the  felt  need  of  it. 
The  gastric  intelligence  does  not  call  for  milk 

107 


Messages  to  Mothers 


and  does  not  agree  on  its  selection  by  the  con- 
scious mind.  The  stomach  refuses  to  digest  it 
and  we  have  then  a  real  digestive  disorder  with 
constipation  and  some  slight  mental  and  physi- 
cal distress  as  the  results.  When  the  bowel  ac~ls 
again  unaided  and  this  abstinence  has  been  main- 
tained some  weeks,  butter  may  be  restored  to  the 
child's  diet,  never  to  be  used  oftener  than  twice 
daily,  because  that  is  the  limit  of  the  "  repeata- 
bility "  of  butter  as  established  by  generations  of 
experience  now  and  long  ago  formulated  into  the 
European  family  custom  of  having  butter  on  the 
table  only  twice  daily.  If  constipation  again  fol- 
lows when  butter  is  resumed,  then  butter  must 
be  stopped,  and  it  will  not  be  worth  while  to  try 
butter  again  for  months.  Any  other  commonly 
used  fat  may  be  substituted  for  butter  if  neces- 
sary or  desirable.  Pure  olive  oil  is  better  and 
cleaner  than  butter  and,  so  far  as  I  can  learn, 
people  invariably  like  it  on  bread.  Children  are 
prejudiced  by  the  appearance  of  the  olive  oil 
bottle,  but  they  easily  follow  example  when  older 
members  of  the  family  use  it  first  and  express 
signs  of  being  pleased  with  it. 

Milk  and  cream  should  not,  alone  nor  mixed 
with  other  foods,  be  given  such  child  again  un- 
less it  wants  them,  and  not  even  then  unless  it 
can  use  them  without  constipation  as  a  result. 
When  milk  and  cream  are  to  be  excluded,  it  is 

108 


Ills  of  the  Weaning  Period 

generally  necessary  to  explain  and  repeat  that 
not  a  drop  of  these  materials  is  to  be  allowed  in 
the  diet  of  the  patient.  By  concealing  milk, 
cream  or  anything  the  stomach  does  not  want, 
we  may  fool  the  conscious  mind  as  represented 
by  sight,  smell  and  taste,  but  we  do  not  fool  the 
subconscious  mind  as  represented  by  the  gastric 
intelligence. 

Here  in  my  neighborhood,  for  example,  was  a 
baby,  six  months  and  twenty  days  old,  that  had 
been  and  still  was  very  sick,  and  under  treatment 
was  getting  no  better.  An  operation  was  con- 
sidered, decided  on  and  appointments  for  that 
purpose  were  about  to  be  made.  A  trifling  event 
served  as  cause  of  change  in  the  conduct  of  the 
case.  The  baby  was  now  let  alone.  It  accepted 
warm  water  in  plenty  and  frequently.  It  refused 
all  offers  of  milk  and  other  foods  until  forty-five 
hours  had  elapsed;  but  during  this  time  grew 
rapidly  better,  rested  and  slept  better,  and  the 
appearance  of  distress  gradually  vanished  from 
its  face  and  gave  place  to  an  appearance  of  com- 
fort and  well-being.  At  the  end  of  forty-five 
hours,  from  the  moment  that  it  was  let  alone,  it 
tasted  and  accepted  food,  a  teaspoonful,  and  a 
half-teaspoonful  more  at  intervals  of  about  two 
hours  during  the  day  and  at  longer  intervals 
during  the  night.  At  the  end  of  six  and  a  half 
days  from  the  beginning  of  this  method  of  treat- 

109 


Messages  to  Mothers 


ment,  this  baby  began  to  eat  very  heartily,  and, 
though  not  yet  seven  months  old,  ate  a  some- 
what surprising  quantity  of  stewed  tomatoes  one 
evening  and  on  the  following  morning  again  ate 
heartily  of  plain  stewed  tomatoes. 

This  baby  was  now  well,  just  seven  days  after 
it  very  narrowly  escaped  an  operation.  It  proved 
to  be  a  success  as  an  omnivorous  animal,  for  it 
ate  of  nearly  all  the  foods  that  its  parents  ate,  so 
far  as  these  were  fresh  or  in  a  good  state  of 
preservation  and  could  be  reduced  to  a  pulp. 
Beef,  potatoes  and  cereals  were,  of  course,  an  im- 
portant share  of  its  diet.  It  had  a  decided  prefer- 
ence for  paste  made  of  the  Hawaiian  taro  root, 
but  it  does  not  follow  that  all  babies  must  prefer 
taro, — in  fa6l  a  neighboring  baby  did  not  fancy 
taro  at  all.  All  this  time  the  aforesaid  baby  was 
refusing  milk,  but  although  it  was  getting  along 
perfectly,  its  mother  had  not  yet  become  recon- 
ciled to  the  necessity,  propriety  or  justice  of 
the  baby  being  deprived,  or  depriving  itself,  of 
milk.  Still  hoping  the  baby  could  some  way  be 
induced  to  take  it,  she  mixed  milk  with  its  taro 
paste  one  day  after  the  baby  had  been  thriving 
about  two  weeks. 

We  cannot  suppose  this  baby  to  have  had  any 
conscious  knowledge  of  a  starchy  paste,  whether 
taro  or  cereal,  nor  of  milk  or  any  other  food- 
stuff. It  could,  however,  by  virtue  of  its  con- 

110 


Ills  of  the  Weaning-  Period 

scious  mind  as  represented  by  its  sense  of  taste, 
select  or  reject  either  mush  or  milk,  or  both. 
Both  mush  and  milk  being  natural  foods, 
provided  by  Nature,  would  be  consistent  with  the 
requirements  of  the  nature  of  the  animal.  But 
the  conscious  mind,  as  represented  by  the  sense 
of  taste  of  this  or  any  other  baby  of  like  age, 
was  not  competent  to  take  cognizance  of  the  ar- 
tificial mixture  by  which  this  mother  attempted 
to  smuggle  milk  into  the  stomach  of  this  baby. 
The  baby  swallowed  the  mixture;  its  sense  of 
taste,  the  "outside  guard"  of  the  stomach,  was 
fooled.  But  even  in  such  a  young  baby  there  is 
a  gastric  intelligence,  a  part  or  faculty  of  the 
fully  developed  subconscious  mind.  This  gastric 
intelligence  was  not  and  would  not  be  fooled. 
The  baby's  stomach  sent  the  mixture  right  up 
again.  This  baby  had  by  force  of  circumstances 
been  weaned  early,  and  early  adopted  the  diet  of 
its  parents;  then  in  about  three  months  still  far- 
ther followed  the  example  of  the  rest  of  the 
family  in  particular  and  of  the  community  in 
general  by  using  milk  regularly  and,  I  am  told, 
successfully. 

As  the  subconscious  mind  is  practically  iner- 
rant,  does  not  make  mistakes,  it  can  afford  to  be 
stubborn  and  uncompromising.  What  it  deter- 
mines on  seems  to  be  final.  When  a  baby's  stomach 
refuses  to  digest  milk,  or  any  mixture  of  which 

111 


Messages  to  Mothers 


it  is  a  part,  we  may  as  well  yield;  not  even  to 
save  its  life  will  it  digest  milk  or  a  mixture 
thereof.  In  spite  of  the  spoiling  mess  that  many 
a  milk-fed  baby  after  the  weaning  time  is  forced 
to  carry  daily,  it  may  live  a  wretched  life  and 
make  other  lives  wretched,  or  it  may  die  as  a  re- 
sult of  the  irritating  and  poisonous  character  of 
the  constantly  present  products  of  putrefaction 
that  result  from  the  constantly  present  milk 
in  its  diet  which  it  will  not  digest,  nor  even 
sterilize. 

Stewed  tomatoes  were  not  specified  in  the  in- 
structions given  to  the  mother  in  the  case  men- 
tioned, but  they  were  included  and  were  none 
the  less  safe  for  having  been  got  from  cans.  The 
instructions  were,  to  offer  the  baby  any  and  all 
such  ordinary  foods  as  are  in  common  use,  fresh 
or  in  a  good  state  of  preservation,  in  their  sim- 
plest, unmixed  and  unconglomerated  states,  re- 
duced by  cooking  and  otherwise  to  conditions 
requiring  no  mastication.  Many  foodstuffs  are 
offered  and  a  few  are  chosen  and  these  are 
enough.  The  mother  simply  offers,  that  is  her 
business;  the  baby  selects,  that  is  its  exclusive 
business,  and  it  is  perfectly  well  qualified  to  at- 
tend to  it  unaided.  If  the  baby  is  hungry  it  will 
taste  what  is  offered,  and  turn  away  if  it  does 
not  want  it,  or  it  vigorously  grabs  the  little 
spoonful  if  it  wants  it.  In  its  selection  it  will 

112 


Ills  of  the  Weaning-  Period 

make  no  mistake  so  long  as  only  the  common 
"repeatable"  foods  are  offered. 

This  is  common  practice  based  on  the  common 
sense  that  is  inherited  and  constitutional.  Both 
are  common  among  primitive  and  illiterate 
mothers  and  naturally  experienced  nurses,  but 
they  are  rare  among  learned  mothers  and  artifi- 
cially trained  nurses  and  do  not  seem  to  have 
been  considered  worthy  of  space  in  the  books 
upon  which  physicians  depend  for  their  learning 
on  the  subject.  A  learned  woman  wondered  why 
common  sense  is  so  called  when  it  is  in  fact  so 
rare.  In  a  state  of  nature  all  young  mammals 
adopt  the  foods  of  their  mothers  as  gradually  as 
their  desire  for  milk  and  the  milk  supply  de- 
crease. Selection  is  the  young  animal's  own 
business,  and  it  is  not  influenced  in  this  matter 
by  anything  more  than  the  mother's  example, 
and  even  that  does  not  appear  to  be  necessary. 
Under  domestication,  young  animals  kept  apart 
from  their  mothers,  as  calves  in  separate  enclo- 
sures, make  no  mistakes  in  selection.  Our  babies, 
when  we  give  them  the  opportunities,  will  dis- 
play the  same  inerrant  faculty  for  selection  as 
any  other  young  mammal. 

The  subconscious  mind  does  not,  we  have  good 
reasons  for  believing,  share  in  the  illness  of  the 
patient,  so  that  even  in  illness  its  selections  and 
rejections  are  just  as  correct  as  in  health  and  just 

113 


Messages  to  Mothers 


as  much  to  be  trusted.  A  want  of  an  animal  in 
a  state  of  nature,  and  such  the  unsophisticated 
baby  or  child  is,  is  a  perfectly  natural  phenome- 
non, and  is  therefore  never  to  be  interpreted  as 
calling  for  anything  that  is  unnatural,  made  so 
by  artificial  modification.  There  is  no  natural 
provision  of  milk  for  a  baby  after  weaning  and 
the  cessation  of  its  mother's  supply.  The  dairy 
is  an  artificial  contrivance,  a  repugnant  institu- 
tion, an  object  of  endless  complaint  and  a  source 
of  more  evil  than  the  distillery  and  the  brewery 
combined. 

To  dispense  with  the  dairy  absolutely  would 
eliminate  almost  entirely  the  ills  peculiar  to  the 
weaning  period  and  so  far  reduce  infant  mor- 
tality as  to  make  the  periods  of  infancy  and 
childhood  no  more  dangerous  to  life  than  any 
other  time  of  life.  If  there  is  any  doubt  about 
this,  we  have  only  to  point  to  the  Japanese 
mother  in  general  and  to  the  generally  excellent 
health,  vigor  and  cheerful  good  temper  of  the 
Japanese  children,  who  get  no  milk  beyond  the 
weaning  time  and  who  are  in  no  greater  danger 
of  disease  and  death  during  infancy  than  at  any 
other  time  of  life. 

To  kill  a  mature  animal  for  its  meat  and  other 
products  of  utility  is  perfectly  right,  natural, 
necessary  and  not  cruel;  but  to  kill  a  young 
calf  for  the  sake  of  getting  its  mother's  milk,  is 

114 


Ills  of  the  Weaning'  Period 

an  unnatural  and  unnecessary  aft  of  cruelty  to 
the  cow.  The  milk  of  the  distressed  cow  goes  to 
feed  babies.  The  subtle  fault  of  this  milk  is 
known  to  physicians  and  mothers,  but  the  milk 
inspector  cannot  detect  it. 

An  item  of  evidence  against  young  calf  kill- 
ing is  the  fact  that,  whereas  everybody  can  eat 
beef  more  and  oftener  than  any  other  meat,  a 
great  many  people  cannot  succeed  in  eating  veal. 
The  conscious  mind  may  choose  veal,  or  consent 
to  eating  it  when  placed  before  the  person,  but 
in  many  cases  the  stomach  does  not  agree  on  the 
choice.  It  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  veal  is 
more  difficult  of  digestion  than  beef.  The  sub- 
conscious mind,  the  gastric  intelligence,  shares  in 
the  conscious  mind's  repugnance  to  the  idea  of 
killing  the  innocent  and  immature  animal  which 
should  rather  be  raised  to  maturity  and  more 
economically  serve  more  useful  purposes.  The 
stomach  can,  of  course,  but  refuses  to  digest  veal 
in  these  cases  and  the  person  is  made  to  suffer  a 
penalty  for  patronizing  the  unnatural  institution 
of  calf  killing. 


115 


Chapter 

Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

The  Merits  of  the  Natural  and  the 
Evils  of  the  Artificial 

BEFORE  children  are  more  than  a  very 
few  years  old,  they  will  feel  an  impor- 
tant special  need  which  will  move  them 
to  express  an  urgent  want  that  should, 
in  the  light  of  what  has  been  said,  be  easily 
understood  and  provided  for.  That  this  want  is 
generally  misunderstood  and  not  rightly  provided 
for,  is  my  reason  for  this  further  explanation. 
This  demand  of  the  subconscious  mind  is  now 
generally  misinterpreted  and  a  counterfeit  is 
given  to  the  child  instead  of  the  real,  natural 
object  that  the  nature  of  the  animal  calls  for. 
The  mistake,  early  begun,  encouraged  by  trades- 
people and  consented  to  by  parents,  is  continued 
through  life,  and  therefore  at  all  times  of  life  we 
find  people  liberally  patronizing  the  candy  shops 
trying  to  satisfy  their  natural  demand  for  sugar 
by  artificial  conglomerations  called  candies. 
In  regard  to  this  obje6l,  sugar,  the  subconscious 
mind's  call  is  urgent  and  persistent,  and  sugar  is 
one  of  the  most  pressing  needs  of  the  body.  I 
will  show  that  serious  ills  are  due  to  lack  of 

116 


Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

sugar  in  the  patient's  diet  and  that  such  ills 
promptly  subside  when  sugar  is  supplied.  I  will 
also  show  that  the  gastric  intelligence  in  some 
cases  refuses  sugar  from  the  bowl,  or  at  any  rate 
objects  to  it  in  such  a  way  that  the  patient  suffers 
for  taking  it,  and  the  cases  are  more  numerous 
in  which  the  patient  suffers  for  eating  candies. 
The  fault  in  the  first  place  lies  in  the  misin- 
terpretation of  the  demand.  The  primitive 
family  had  no  sugar  in  a  bowl  nor  any  candies. 
Our  longings  differ  from  those  of  the  primitive 
man,  if  at  all,  only  in  degree  but  not  in  kind. 
He  found  foods  with  varying  amounts  of  sugar, 
some  of  them  as  rich  in  sugar  and  as  sweet  as 
candy  itself.  He  had  recourse  to  these  just  as  we 
can  have.  The  gastric  intelligence  agrees  on  the 
choice  of  sweet  fruits  to  the  extent  that  we  need 
them  and  we  actually  find  that  those  who  suffer 
for  eating  sugar,  or  candies,  or  sweet  pastries,  do 
not  suffer  when  they  eat  sweet  fruits  to  the  ex- 
tent of  their  needs.  It  is  a  proper  cause  of  com- 
plaint against  parents  generally,  that  they  fail 
to  supply  children  with  sweet  fruits  and  that 
they  erroneously  supply  the  artificial  sweets  in- 
stead, or  permit  children  to  supply  themselves. 
We  actually  find  that  children  who  get  what 
sweet  fruits  they  need  will  not  care  for  candy; 
the  candy-shop  has  but  slight  temptation  for 
them.  In  the  child  who  gets  not  enough  sweet 

117 


Messages  to  Mothers 


fruits  and  is  denied  sugar  and  candies,  we  can 
demonstrate  defects  of  digestion  and  of  physical 
maintenance  and  growth,  and  we  can  show  by 
his  conduct  and  his  work  that  the  child  is 
mentally  and  morally  defective. 

It  never  happens  that  we  acquire  digestive  dis- 
orders from  ingesting  what  we  need,  if  the  thing 
be  fresh  or  in  a  good  state  of  preservation. 
Whatever  we  need  we  will  also  want  and  like. 
The  natural  and  only  safe  basis  of  the  want  is 
the  need.  But  we  want  candy  because  we  like  it, 
and  on  this  improper  motive  we  erroneously 
select  candy  as  the  object  of  our  need  of  sugar 
as  Nature  has  supplied  it  in  sweet  fruits.  Quite 
a  list  of  things  erroneously  go  into  the  mouth 
on  the  mere  basis  of  liking  them,  and  the  liking 
is  acquired  and  is  a  matter  of  unnatural  habit. 
Some  such  things  are:  artificial  conglomerations 
of  real  foods,  as,  for  examples,  excessively  com- 
plex soups,  stews,  gravies,  puddings  and  cakes; 
that  impure,  stale  and  artificially  derived  fat 
called  butter;  milk  after  the  weaning  period; 
also  things  that  are  not  foods  at  all,  as  spices, 
tea,  coffee,  alcoholic  beverages  and  tobacco.  So 
far  as  the  ingested  materials  are  concerned  as 
causes  of  digestive  disorders,  we  can  never  blame 
a  thing  that  we  wanted  because  we  needed  it, 
but  we  will  always  be  able  to  fasten  the  blame  on 
things  that  we  wanted  simply  because  we  liked 

118 


Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

them.  Most  people  can  without  much  harm 
make  moderate  use  of  most  of  the  things  that 
go  unnaturally  into  the  mouth  or  stomach;  they 
can  at  least  endure  them,  keep  well  in  spite  of 
them,  or  even  enjoy  them  and  their  effects  and 
thus  count  them  as  among  the  blessings  bestowed 
upon  us. 

By  misinterpretation  of  our  natural  want  of 
sugar  as  it  is  naturally  available,  we  erroneously 
choose  to  take  the  unnaturally  isolated  sugar  in- 
stead of  the  natural  sweet  fruits  and  find  that 
our  needs  are  very  well  served  by  the  "just  as 
good  "  and  more  convenient  and  cheaper  article. 
The  error  is  only  a  slight  one  so  far  as  it  concerns 
people  disposed  to  moderation.  Others,  however, 
wanting  sugar  first  because  they  need  it,  want  it 
next  because  they  like  it  and  fall  into  the  habit 
of  taking  more  than  enough  and  oftener  than 
necessary  and  land  in  trouble  as  a  result  of  the 
excess.  A  need  want  is  satisfied  by  that  much 
which  fulfils  the  need,  but  a  like  want  knows  no 
such  limit,  because,  however  much  is  taken,  the 
like  persists,  the  want  continues  and  the  limit  of 
the  amount  taken  is  the  capacity  to  take  or  to 
endure,  where  the  stomach  is  leniently  submissive 
to  cramming,  otherwise  the  objection  of  the 
stomach  marks  the  limit. 

It  is  hard  to  tell  from  the  need's  point  of  view 
when  one  has  enough  of  sugar,  but  in  the  case  of 

119 


Messages  to  Mothers 


the  sweet  fruits,  when  the  amount  taken  has  ful- 
filled the  need,  the  want  ceases  and  the  feeling 
of  enough  is  such  that  it  would  be  difficult  to  eat 
more.  The  mere  like  of  it  gets  children  into  the 
habit  of  using  sugar  on  all  possible  occasions  and 
in  all  possible  ways  and  the  maximum  possible 
or  permissible  amounts.  The  like  bad  practice 
would  be  impossible  with  sweet  fruits.  Sugar  is 
likely  to  be  used  twenty-one  times  a  week;  sweet 
fruits  are  not  likely  to  be  used  more  than  seven 
times  a  week,  and  generally  people  get  all  the 
sugar  they  need  by  eating  sweet  fruits  three  or 
four  times  a  week.  Of  sweet  fruits  people  will 
eat  only  so  much  as  their  need  want  calls  for,  and 
they  are  not  going  to  have  any  like  wants  in  re- 
gard to  them.  Sugar  in  the  unnatural  condition 
of  isolated  purity,  we  charge  with  having  an  al- 
luring quality  which  induces  us  to  like  it  to  such 
an  extent  that  we  use  it  far  too  often  and  a  great 
deal  too  much  from  no  other  motive  than  that 
we  like  it.  Many  are  the  cases,  therefore,  in  which 
the  gastric  intelligence  has  been  offended  by  too 
much  of  a  good  thing  and  will  tolerate  no  more 
of  it,  unless  it  be  after  a  more  or  less  prolonged 
interval  of  abstinence  from  it. 

I  will  cite  some  individual  cases  and  some 
classes  of  cases  from  which  my  views  of  this 
matter  have  been  derived. 

First — A  boy  about  ten  years  of  age  was  so 

120 


Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

regularly  naughty,  disobedient  and  defiant,  as  to 
be  a  source  of  much  trouble  to  his  mother  and 
the  other  children  of  the  family,  all  for  no  ap- 
parent reason.  There  was  nothing  suggestive  of 
physical  ailment  about  the  boy,  and  from  a 
knowledge  of  his  parents  it  was  concluded  that 
his  meanness  was  not  hereditary,  so  we  determined 
to  suspect  some  fault  among  the  things  that  en- 
tered his  stomach,  and  began  a  search  in  that 
line.  Not  at  first,  but  in  its  turn,  sugar  from  the 
bowl  was  eliminated,  and  thereafter  Jack  was  a 
good  boy.  He  was  allowed  then  to  have  and  to 
eat  sweet  fruits  without  stint.  Naming  the  in- 
sanity of  this  boy  with  reference  to  its  cause, 
what  else  can  we  call  it  but  a  digestive  disorder? 
His  gastric  intelligence  did  not  agree  on  the 
choice  of  sugar  hi  the  unnatural  form  of  isolated 
purity,  but  it  does  agree  on  the  sweet  fruits.  His 
insanity  was  a  result  of  an  erroneous  interpreta- 
tion of  his  want  and  the  consequent  selection 
of  the  wrong  object, — the  thing  he  liked  and 
wanted  instead  of  the  thing  he  needed  and 
wanted. 

Second. — A  boy  of  ten  years,  whose  bladder 
had  always  automatically  let  go  its  content  dur- 
ing sleep  in  spite  of  threats,  penalties,  doctoring 
and  drugging,  was  allowed  free  and  unrestrained 
access  to  a  big  box  of  dates,  and  astonished  all 
the  family  by  the  quantities  he  ate,  which  only 

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Messages  to  Mothers 


showed  how  urgent  was  his  need  of  them.  But 
he  also  astonished  his  parents  by  ceasing  at  once 
and  for  good  his  bad  habit  of  wetting  the  bed 
every  night.  Here  was  a  problem  for  the  physi- 
cian; the  stomach  was  looked  to  but  there  was 
no  digestive  disorder  apparent,  so  there  was  noth- 
ing to  be  eliminated.  The  question  then  arising 
was,  is  there  anything  in  the  food  line  that  the 
boy  needs,  wants  and  is  not  getting?  A  raven- 
ous eagerness  for  sweets  was  found  and  at  once 
supplied  by  a  box  of  dates  with  free  access 
thereto  and  with  the  result  mentioned.  Had  the 
boy  been  allowed  what  was  called  for  by  his 
wants,  based  upon  his  needs;  had  the  wants  been 
interpreted  as  calling  for  natural  objects,  a  whole 
lot  of  trouble  and  much  cruelty  would  have 
been  averted.  This  boy's  trouble  was  a  result  of 
what  we  must  call  a  digestive  disorder.  We  could 
not  have  found  the  fault  which  served  as  cause, 
except  in  the  digestive  department.  He  suffered 
from  a  need  unsupplied  while  others  suffer  from 
a  supply  not  needed. 

Third. — A  gentleman  told  me  that  when  he 
drank  coffee  at  all,  it  was  at  noon;  that  he 
wanted  it  and  liked  it,  but  only  occasionally  took 
a  cup  and  that  it  was  not  worth  while  taking  it 
at  all,  because  it  made  him  "nervous,  irritable 
and  savage"  and  involved  him  in  danger  of  of- 
fending others  about  the  office.  He  was  reminded 

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Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

that  his  cup  of  coffee  also  contained  sugar  and 
that,  after  all,  the  circumstantial  evidence  was  as 
much  against  the  sugar  as  the  coffee.  Now  he 
takes  coffee  without  sugar  and  is  convinced  that 
it  never  was  the  coffee  but  always  the  sugar  that 
did  the  harm.  Supposing  this  man  had  been 
taking  his  coffee  with  his  usual  sugar  every  day 
and  that  he  had  been  daily  "  nervous,  irritable 
and  savage,"  I  should  have  called  him  a  chronic 
dyspeptic,  even  if  there  were  no  objective  signs 
of  digestive  disorder  present.  And  such  a  chronic 
dyspeptic,  it  is  plainly  evident,  can  be  cured  in 
thirty-six  hours.  But  he  would  have  looked  with 
suspicion  on  any  one  who  held  out  such  hope,  or 
made  such  a  promise;  he  would  not  have  em- 
ployed such  a  person.  Sugar  in  the  artificial  state 
of  isolation  is  habitually  kept  in  reach,  is  habit- 
ually misappropriated  to  supply  a  need  want  and 
simultaneously  used  to  supply  a  like  want,  and 
for  the  latter  purpose  is  used  far  too  often,  so  that 
as  a  result  the  gastric  intelligence  becomes  tired 
of  it,  just  as  the  conscious  mind  becomes  tired  of 
and  disgusted  with  things  that  are  repeated  too 
often  to  the  ear,  however  inoffensive  the  same 
things  may  have  been  at  first,  as,  for  example, 
whistling,  that  eternal,  infernal,  diurnal  and  noc- 
turnal nuisance  and  disturbance  of  the  peace. 
Just  what  happens  in  these  cases  in  which  defect 
of  digestion  is  not  clearly  made  out,  I  cannot 

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Messages  to  Mothers 


say,  but  abnormal  irritability  is  a  result.  To  this 
result,  and  back  of  it  to  sugar,  I  have  no  doubt, 
may  be  traced  domestic  discords,  incompatibili- 
ties, disruptions,  divorces,  suicides  and  other  trag- 
edies,— a  very  little  unrecognized  digestive  dis- 
order in  the  party  at  fault  being  at  the  bottom 
and  beginning  of  his  troubles.  The  art  of  food 
conglomeration  has  been  much  advanced,  the 
simple  life  has  been  far  departed  from  and  the 
number  of  restrained  insane  patients  has  enor- 
mously increased  in  proportion  to  population 
during  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

Fourth. — A  man,  aged  fifty-three  years,  had 
by  "constant  pain  and  diarrhea"  been  reduced 
in  four  and  a  half  months  from  two  hundred 
and  ten  pounds  to  one  hundred  and  fifty  pounds 
and  seemed  destined  to  die  before  many  days 
longer.  Sugar  was  eliminated  from  his  diet  and 
he  rapidly  recovered  and  lived  with  good  health 
to  the  age  of  seventy-one. 

Fifth. — The  commonest  result  of  sugar,  when 
the  stomach  does  not  agree  on  its  ingestion,  is 
the  inflation  of  the  stomach  with  a  tasteless  and 
odorless  gas  which  proceeds  from  fermenting 
material  in  the  stomach  and  causes  some  distress 
by  its  bulk  but  does  not  make  the  patient  quite 
ill. 

Sixth. — There  occur  still  other  cases  in  which 
sugar  causes  actual  painful  illness,  the  description 

124 


Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

of  which  would  hardly  be  successful,  as  it  should 
be  felt  or  at  least  seen  to  be  appreciated. 

Here,  then,  are  four  very  different  effects  of 
sugar  when  the  stomach  does  not  agree  on  its  in- 
gestion.  The  physician,  who  says  there  are  many 
kinds  of  dyspepsia,  can  make  out  four  kinds  right 
here,  if  he  still  insists  on  classifying  according 
to  phenomena  as  seen  by  the  do6lor  and  as  felt 
by  the  patient;  but  it  is  much  more  convenient, 
as  soon  as  we  find  the  cause  in  the  case,  to  classify 
with  reference  to  the  cause,  and  designate  the 
ills  mentioned  as  only  one  kind  of  dyspepsia  for 
the  reason  that  the  causes  were  identical  in  all. 

After  citing  the  foregoing  very  simple  exam- 
ples of  digestive  disorder,  I  would  not  like  to 
pass  on  without  stating  that  the  whole  great 
subject  of  digestive  disorders,  with  its  curious 
train  of  resulting  ills,  is  as  simple  as  the  exam- 
ples cited.  We  may  then  dispense  with  all  the 
great  mass  of  attention — study,  work,  drugs,  big 
books,  apparatus  and  operations,  all  which  have 
proved  much  worse  than  useless, —  and  look  for 
causes,  all  of  which  are  as  easy  to  find  and  to  re- 
move as  in  the  sugar  cases  cited.  Remove  such 
causes  and  the  subconscious  mind  does  all  the 
rest  so  well,  so  completely  and  so  promptly  as  to 
astonish  the  observer  and  suggest  talk  of  the 
miraculous.  To  devote  any  effort  to  the  treatment 
of  digestive  disorders  is  just  like  treating  the 

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Messages  to  Mothers 


results  of  leaks  in  the  roof.  No  amount  of  treat- 
ment will  cure  the  results  in  either  case,  but  if 
the  leaks  be  mended  the  results  will  cease  to  ap- 
pear. 

Candies,  being  less  regularly  used  than  sugar, 
would  seem  to  be  doing  less  harm  in  the  aggre- 
gate, but  comparing  candy  and  sugar  results  in 
individual  cases,  the  candy  would  seem  to  be  the 
worse  of  the  two.  Candies,  especially  fancy  can- 
dies, are  very  much  artificial,  and  in  proportion 
to  the  artificial  character  of  a  thing  put  into  the 
stomach  is  its  capacity  for  harm. 

Results  of  candy  eating  are  as  various  and  as 
curious  as  those  of  sugar.  In  two  healthy  small 
children  of  the  same  family,  the  same  supply  of 
French-mixed  candy  during  the  same  period  of 
time  produced  in  one  a  skin  disease  called  "  pso- 
riasis"; in  the  other  the  result  was  irritability, 
ill  temper,  and  defiant  disobedience.  The  evils 
alluded  to  do  not  generally  appear  as  results  of 
using  sugar  or  candy  now  and  then,  but  in  cases 
of  continued  and  somewhat  prolonged  repetition 
they  are  very  likely  to  occur.  Often  there  is 
much  and  prolonged  suffering  before  the  cause 
is  found  out. 

The  like  want  of  the  unnatural,  combined 
with  the  need  want  of  the  natural,  is  so  domi- 
nant as  to  compel  the  patient  to  continue  the 
use  of  the  mistaken  objects  until  he  becomes 

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Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

aware  of  his  misinterpretation  of  his  own  nature's 
demand,  and  corrects  it  by  abstaining  from  the 
unnatural  and  resorting  to  the  natural — the  sweet 
fruits  for  the  sugar  that  the  need  want  calls  for; 
or  the  penalty  of  suffering  is  so  great  as  to  force 
him  to  quit  the  unnatural  and  do  without  the 
natural  object  of  his  need  because  he  does  not 
think  of  it;  in  which  case  he  must  remain  far 
from  well.  A  very  interesting  series  of  cases 
could  be  cited  showing  very  troublesome  and 
distressing  ills  of  body  and  mind  in  persons  who 
were  not  getting  their  needed  sugar,  all  which 
subsided  when  they  were  by  instruction  and 
direction  induced  to  resort  to  sweet  fruits. 

It  is  easy  enough  to  see  and  understand  that 
sugars,  as  well  as  starches  and  fats,  are  provided 
by  Nature,  not  in  isolated  states  of  purity,  but 
in  combination  or  association  with  other  details, 
and  it  is  as  great  Nature  presents  them  that  the 
small  nature  of  the  animal  needs  and  wants 
them.  "  I  thoroughly  agree,"  said  Professor  E. 
W.  Hilgard  of  the  University  of  California, 
"  that  the  appetite  for  sweets  should,  whenever 
possible,  be  satisfied,  not  with  candy,  but  with 
fruits  like  prunes  and  raisins." 

Sugars,  starches  and  fats  are  fuel  foods;  they 
are  ordinarily  the  sources  of  all  the  forms  of 
energy  or  power  that  we  display,  whether  it  be 
in  work  of  muscle  or  brain.  But  sugar  is  still 

127 


Messages  to  Mothers 


more  than  a  mere  item  of  fuel;  there  is  a  most 
important  additional  necessity  for  its  constant 
even  if  not  daily  use.  The  liver  needs  sugar; 
the  liver  makes  the  bile;  the  intestine  needs  the 
bile  for  digestion  of  fats  and  for  disinfection  of 
the  bowel's  content.  When  the  liver  does  not 
get  sufficient  sugar,  there  will  not  be  enough 
bile,  which  fact  can  be  ascertained  by  a  glance  at 
the  material  from  the  bowel,  which  will  be  light 
brown  or  yellow,  whereas  that  color  in  all  but  in- 
fants should  be  brown  or  dark  brown.  Without 
sugar  enough  there  will  not  be  bile  enough  and 
the  fats  will  not  be  economically  used  up  and 
putrefaction  will  proceed  too  far  and  an  excess  of 
gas  with  an  unusually  bad  odor  will  be  present 
in  the  bowel.  Constipation  also  generally  accom- 
panies this  state  of  affairs,  which  again  in  turn 
serves  as  cause  for  still  other  ills.  This  is  a  con- 
dition actually  existing  in  thousands  of  men, 
women  and  children.  Many  of  these  cases  are 
especially  distinguished  by  irregularly  periodical 
headaches. 

A  great  many  sufferers  with  their  sick  head- 
aches, their  constipations  and  their  variety  of 
morbid  nervous  phenomena,  are  not  satisfying 
their  longings  in  accordance  with  their  own  in- 
terpretation of  them;  for  they  have  learned  by 
painful  experience  that  the  stomach  does  not 
agree  on  their  selections.  The  very  things  which 

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Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

they  believe  they  so  much  long  for  make  them 
sick.  The  stomach  can  digest  them  now  as  well 
as  formerly  and  as  well  as  other  stomachs  can, 
but  it  refuses  uncompromisingly  to  do  so.  The 
nature  of  the  animal  will  be  found  to  be  always 
consistent;  it  is  not  true  that  candies  and  such 
like  are  demanded  by  it,  else  the  stomach  would 
not  refuse  them;  the  conscious  mind  in  these 
cases  misinterprets  the  demand.  Instead  of  the 
artificial  conglomerates  that  claim  the  attention 
of  the  sufferer,  put  before  him  sweet  fruits  and 
it  will  soon  be  acknowledged  that  these  are  just 
what  was  needed.  So  promptly  does  a  good  and 
happy  result  follow  that  it  may  be  said  that  these 
fruits  constitute  the  specific  remedy  in  the  case, 
and  so  they  do. 

There  are  many  who  have  been  suffering  the 
indescribable  agonies  of  sick  headaches  since 
childhood,  as  long  as  forty  years.  The  medical 
profession  does  not  cure  them.  Here  is  the  one 
specific  remedy,  the  enduring  cure :  keep  sweet 
fruits  in  sight  and  in  reach;  guided  by  feeling 
only,  let  the  patient  eat  of  them  all  he  wants  and 
as  often  as  he  wants  them;  later  on  let  him  be 
careful  not  to  eat  of  them  unless  he  wants  them. 
He  will  not  want  them  every  day,  but  he  will 
need  and  want  them  every  week  in  the  year. 

Give  children  all  the  sweet  fruits  they  want 
and  it  will  alarm  many  a  parent  to  see  the  quan- 

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Messages  to  Mothers 


titles  they  will  at  first  consume;  but  this  only 
shows  how  urgently  these  children  have  been 
needing  such  fruits.  They  will  eat  much  smaller 
quantities  each  succeeding  day,  and  in  two  weeks 
they  will  need  and  want  sweet  fruits  not  more 
than  a  few  times  a  week;  but  by  all  means  let 
them  have  all  they  want  each  day.  Of  course,  we 
all  desire  to  achieve  the  best  possible  physical 
and  mental  development  for  our  children;  we 
wish  to  encourage  good  work  and  good  conduct. 
Satisfy  their  actual  needs  and  children  will  as  a 
rule  be  well  and  surprisingly  good.  Sweet  fruits 
can  make  great  changes  for  the  better  in  the 
matter  of  the  health  and  happiness  of  a  great 
many  homes.  Sugar  in  the  form  of  sweet  fruits 
is  simply  indispensable;  the  universal  clamoring 
for  candy  and  its  enormous  and  eager  consump- 
tion prove  this.  Any  one  can  readily  satisfy  him- 
self on  this  point  by  giving  children  all  the 
sweet  fruits  they  want  and  noting  the  improve- 
ment in  them  physically,  mentally  and  morally. 
Let  sufficient  sweet  fruit  be  supplied  and  there 
is  an  end  to  the  temptation  to  eat  the  artificially 
conglomerated  sweets. 

In  thousands  of  children,  youths  and  adults, 
apparently  able-bodied,  going  about  their  busi- 
ness, we  can  find  in  the  tongue,  skin,  stomach 
and  bowel,  evidences  of  ill  health,  of  defective 
maintenance,  and,  worst  of  all,  mental  ineffi- 

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Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

ciency  bears  witness  to  the  fac~l  that  their  brains 
share  in  the  general  disorder.  Faults  of  com- 
plexion, paleness  of  lips,  blackheads,  hangnails, 
early  decay  of  teeth,  arrest  of  development, 
epilepsy  and  so  on,  in  learned  and  well-to-do 
families,  certainly  lead  to  the  suspicion  that  there 
is  much  ill  feeding,  if  not  under  feeding. 

The  supply  of  dried  sweet  fruits  in  variety  for 
the  family  at  the  minimum  rate  of  fifty  pounds 
per  year  per  individual  would  not  involve  an 
extra  expense.  A  small  outlay  is  simply  made 
for  the  right  and  natural  materials  instead  of  a 
greater  outlay  for  the  wrong  and  unnatural 
ones,  not  to  mention  further  and  sometimes  enor- 
mously greater  outlays  incidental  to  the  evil 
results  of  using  the  wrong  materials.  Let  those 
who  are  looking  for  a  tonic  try  sweet  fruits  for 
the  restoration  of  vigor  and  cheerful  temper. 
When  there  is  occasion  to  suspect  the  liver,  sweet 
fruits  may  well  be  resorted  to ;  the  liver  will 
then  get  the  sugar  it  needs.  I  have  met  very 
sensible  people  who  finished  complicated  meals 
with  the  feeling  that  there  was  yet  something 
they  wanted,  a  feeling  that  they  could  distin- 
guish in  themselves  any  time  of  day  during  a 
period  of  years.  The  health  in  such  cases  is  not 
right ;  there  are  many  people  in  that  condition. 
They  want,  because  they  need,  sweet  fruits ;  it 
is  news  to  them  to  be  so  informed.  They  should 

131 


Messages  to  Mothers 


keep  sweet  fruits  in  reach  and  eat  what  and 
when  they  want  of  them.  They  will  find  them- 
selves better  satisfied  thenceforth  with  meals 
much  less  complicated,  and  they  will  feel  better, 
happier,  and  will  work  more  efficiently. 

To  eat  nothing  and  starve  to  death  is  a  simple 
matter,  but  to  be  deprived  of  some  one  essential 
and  suffer  partial  starvation,  with  an  inevitable 
string  of  ills  and  a  fairly  good  prospe6l  of  a  very 
slow  death,  is  not  so  simple.  Any  discussion  of 
the  subject  would  simply  result  in  the  conclusion 
that  we  must,  for  the  sake  of  health  of  body  and 
mind,  have  everything  we  really  need  and  want 
to  eat  and  all  we  need  and  want  of  it  and  as 
often  as  we  need  and  want  it.  Nothing  in  Nature 
is  more  plainly  indicated  than  the  fact  that  we 
all  want  sugar  in  natural  combination  as  sup- 
plied by  the  sweet  fruits. 

There  are  four  kinds  of  sweet  fruits  conspicu- 
ously present  and  available  for  selection  and  still 
others  not  so  sweet  are  available.  They  are  not 
fresh  and  it  is  not  practicable  to  have  them  so, 
especially  in  cities,  but  they  are  in  a  perfectly 
good  and  natural  state  of  preservation  and  are 
thus  available  and  adapted  for  use  to  supply  our 
persistent  needs  the  year  round. 

These  four  are  dates,  figs,  raisins  and  prunes. 
The  best  of  these  for  the  individual  is  that  one 
which  his  feeling  moves  him  to  prefer,  and  to 

132 


Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

prefer  most  frequently  during  the  greatest  length 
of  time.  Briefly,  that  which  is  most  "  repeatable  " 
is  the  best.  One's  best  is  not  always  another's 
best;  so  each  one  must  mind  his  own  business  in 
this  matter  of  selection  of  sweet  fruits,  because 
it  is  not  always  practicable  to  follow  the  example 
of  another.  The  individual  differences  of  choice 
are  exceptional,  but  are  numerous  enough  and 
important  enough  to  command  respect  and  to 
serve  as  cause  of  trouble  when  disregarded.  It 
still  remains  true,  however,  that  there  is  in 
general  a  best  sweet  fruit. 

Dates,  two  varieties,  are  by  far  the  most  "  re- 
peatable "  of  all  the  sweet  fruits.  Generally  peo- 
ple easily  and  soon  get  tired  of  figs,  prunes  and 
raisins,  but  the  date  bears  repetition  longest  and 
it  is  a  rare  exception  that  one  gets  tired  of  it. 
Dates  are  "repeatable"  more  times  daily  and  a 
greater  number  of  consecutive  days  than  any 
other  sweet  fruit  that  comes  in  our  way.  Of 
course,  dates  can  be  dispensed  with  by  us  in 
America,  but  not  without  some  hardship  regard- 
less of  any  comparison  as  to  costs.  We  could  get 
along  with  figs,  raisins  and  prunes,  and  Califor- 
nia might  produce  the  greater  part  of  the  four 
billions  of  pounds  which  would  be  only  the 
actual  minimum  annual  need  of  the  United 
States.  In  private  practice  and  in  public,  so  far 
as  this  writing  may  go,  we  must  adhere  to  our 

133 


Messages  to  Mothers 


preference  for  dates;  because  they  are  the  best 
sweet  fruit,  because  they  are  a  great  deal  cheaper 
than  figs  and  raisins,  and,  while  no  dearer  than 
prunes  generally,  the  date  is  very  much  superior 
and  therefore  so  much  the  cheaper  even  at  the 
same  price. 

The  retail  prices  for  dates  are  generally  eight 
and  one-third  and  twelve  and  one-half  cents  per 
pound,  for  the  two  varieties  respectively.  Of 
raisins,  the  producer  complains  of  receiving  too 
little  to  pay  the  costs  of  production,  and  the  re- 
tail price  for  good  raisins  right  here  in  Califor- 
nia— twenty  to  twenty-five  cents  per  pound — is 
so  high  that  the  great  masses  of  consumers  resort 
to  raisins  only  as  a  luxury  and  as  rarely  as  the 
occurrence  of  Christmas.  We  shall  be  producing 
dates  after  a  while  in  the  natural  and  artificial 
oases  of  our  own  deserts,  and  fig,  raisin  and  prune 
production  will  become  so  adjusted  that  the  pro- 
ducer can  produce  and  the  consumer  can  con- 
sume on  terms  satisfactory  to  both.  The  State  of 
California  has  the  qualifications  and  can  develop 
the  capacity  to  supply  the  four  billions  of  pounds 
of  dry,  assorted  sweet  fruits  annually  that  the 
people  of  the  United  States  so  urgently  need, 
instead  of  the  overdone  sugar  in  its  artificial 
state  of  isolation  and  the  still  more  artificial  and 
adulterated  conglomerations  known  as  confec- 
tions. 

134 


Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

Figs,  however  good,  are  generally  the  least 
"repeatable"  of  the  sweet  fruits  ;  a  few  pounds 
at  a  time  for  the  family  at  intervals  of  some 
weeks  are  enough.  They  are  not  used  so  much 
as  that,  for  the  reason  that  the  imported  figs 
cost  more  than  twice  as  much  as  dates,  and  the 
California  product,  judging  it  by  the  share  that 
is  left  for  home  consumption,  is  not  uniformly 
good,  or  not  uniformly  well  preserved.  There  is 
too  often  a  questionable  package,  or  a  question- 
able fig  in  a  package,  that  is  likely  to  give  rise 
to  a  dislike  and  a  suspicion  of  figs  in  general. 
There  is  room  for  improvement,  and  it  will 
doubtless  take  place. 

Generally  the  retail  price  of  prunes  is  hardly 
to  be  complained  of,  except  that  the  producer 
has  been  getting  a  ruinously  small  share  of  it, 
and  we  assume  that  good  raisins  will  soon  be- 
come available  at  a  fair  price  in  comparison  with 
dates.  The  supply  of  dates  is  not  sufficient  for 
American  needs;  a  greater  demand  for  dates 
would  raise  the  price,  while  a  greater  demand 
for  raisins  and  prunes  would  stimulate  and  in- 
crease production  to  an  extent  that  would  make 
them  cheaper  than  at  present.  Raisins,  prunes 
and  figs  are  destined  to  be  called  for  in  vastly 
greater  quantities  from  year  to  year  in  the  im- 
mediate future.  They  serve  the  sweet-fruit  pur- 
poses and  can  be  produced  in  this  State  to  such 

135 


Messages  to  Mothers 


an  extent  and  at  such  cost  to  the  consumer  as  to 
determine  upon  their  selection  to  supply  the 
greater  share  of  the  demand. 

A  false  alarm  about  seeds  is  an  excuse  some 
people  have  for  not  eating  raisins.  The  alarm  is 
false  indeed.  It  has  grown  out  of  suspicion  that 
has  no  foundation  in  experience.  The  grinding 
of  seeds  is  good  exercise  for  the  teeth  and  jaws; 
children  do  not  object  to  seeds;  they  will  have 
better  and  more  enduring  teeth  for  having  used 
them  more  severely.  It  is  also  good  and  natural 
to  have  coarse  materials  moving  along  through 
the  bowel.  It  is  reasonable  to  suppose  that  ex- 
cessive grinding  and  cooking,  and  exclusion  of 
the  rough  constituents  of  our  food  materials, 
have  left  too  little  for  our  digestive  apparatus  to 
do,  and  have  thus  contributed  to  their  degenera- 
tion. When  even  a  very  young  child  swallows  a 
prune  stone,  there  will  be  no  cause  for  alarm; 
the  stone  that  will  slip  into  the  stomach  so  easily 
will  pass  out  of  the  bowel  quite  as  easily.  The 
seeds  and  stones  are  indigestible,  of  course,  but 
it  is  never  the  indigestible  material  that  does 
any  harm.  It  is  the  materials  that  spoil, 
the  products  of  fermentative  and  putrefactive 
changes,  that  do  the  harm.  The  seeds  and  stones 
will  not  behave  that  way. 

To  cook  prunes,  rinse  them  off   with   cold 
water;  leave  them  in  a  saucepan  to  soak  a  night 

136 


Sweet  Fruits  Versus  Confections 

or  half-day  just  barely  covered  with  water,  then 
let  them  come  slowly  up  to  the  boiling  heat  and 
they  are  done.  Cook  only  what  you  can  use  the 
same  day;  no  regular  consumer  wants  prunes 
two  days  in  succession;  prunes  are  not "  repeata- 
ble "  to  that  extent.  Never  add  sugar  nor  any 
flavoring  matters  to  prunes.  Prunes  are  a  Na- 
ture's combination  which  no  cook  can  improve 
upon.  Attempts  to  improve  them  will  only  re- 
sult in  a  mixture  that  the  stomach  may  not  agree 
to  and  which  at  any  rate  is  not  so  "  repeatable " 
as  prunes  pure  and  simple. 


137 


Chapter  VII 

Some  Failures  at  School 

Why  They  Occur  and  How 
They  May  be  Avoided 


THE  functions  of  human  power  and  the 
endurance  of  human  instrumentalities 
concern  the  mother  again  in  relation 
to  school  work  of  her  children,  and  it  is 
undoubtedly  our  duty  to  use  this  present  oppor- 
tunity to  discuss  this  matter,  which  in  respect  of 
vital  importance  is  quite  equal  to  any  subject 
that  we  have  gone  over. 

From  the  Journal  of  the  American  Medical 
Association,  1906,  is  quoted  as  follows:  "As  the 
end  of  the  school  year  approached,  the  newspa- 
pers brought  the  usual  crop  of  sad  stories  with 
regard  to  children  on  whose  developing  mental 
faculties  the  pressure  of  school  work  had  made 
serious  havoc.  At  the  end  of  May  there  began  to 
be  occasional  reports  of  children  disappearing 
from  their  homes,  running  away  from  school, 
and  otherwise  making  themselves  subjects  for 
newspaper  comment  more  than  at  any  season  of 
the  year.  During  June  the  stories  of  children, 
especially  girls,  who  were  noted  for  acting 
queerly  as  the  result  of  overwork  at  school,  be- 

138 


Some  Failures  at  School 


came  more  frequent.  Toward  the  end  of  the 
month  there  were  a  few  reported  suicides.  In 
most  of  the  cases  a  dire<$l  connexion  between 
worry  over  school  work,  competition  for  prizes 
and  preparation  for  examinations  could  be 
traced." 

This  quoted  statement  defines  premises  with 
which  we  have  been  familiar  without  under- 
standing, of  which  we  have  knowledge  but  not 
sufficient  for  transmutation  to  a6lion;  yet  there 
is,  perhaps,  no  lesson  of  vital  importance,  derived 
from  the  experience  of  others  before  us  and 
around  us,  that  we  so  much  need  to  learn  as  that 
which  is  available  from  the  statement  quoted. 
The  writer  quoted  makes  liberal  allowance  for 
sensational  exaggeration  of  such  accounts  by  the 
newspapers;  but  no  such  allowance  need  be 
made;  exaggerated  accounts  of  the  few  cases  do 
not  begin  to  compensate  for  the  vastly  greater 
number  of  unmentioned  instances  of  slight  dam- 
age to  children  from  the  same  causes,  but  which 
are  not  sensational  enough  for  publication.  The 
trouble  as  a  whole  could  hardly  be  exaggerated. 
For  one  such  case  published,  I  have  no  doubt 
there  are  fifty  others  that  would  appear  of  no 
consequence  to  the  general  public.  The  case  of 
the  little  harm,  however,  differs  only  in  degree 
from  the  case  of  irreparable  ruin,  and  to  give  a 
mere  passing  glance  at  the  few  cases  that  attain 

139 


Messages  to  Mothers 


to  public  notoriety,  is  not  giving  heed  to  the 
signs  of  a  really  prevalent  and  wide-spread  dan- 
ger. 

"  It  seems  to  be  the  eftort  from  primary  grade 
to  university  to  crowd  the  child's  brain  to  the 
utmost,  and  each  year  we  see  wrecks,  mental 
and  physical,  leaving  our  schools."  I  would  not 
agree,  however,  that  "  medical  inspectors  should 
be  a  part  of  our  school  organizations."  Medical 
men  are  not  qualified  to  avert  the  evils  that  we 
are  considering,  and,  when  the  damage  appears, 
the  case  naturally  falls  to  the  care  of  a  physician 
of  the  family's  own  choosing.  The  cases  do  not 
need  to  be  discovered,  they  merge  into  view 
spontaneously.  The  first  signs  are  observable  to 
parents  and  teachers.  I  would  agree  on  instruc- 
tion of  teachers,  normal-school  classes,  and  on 
open  discussions  in  school-board  meetings  and  in 
the  public  press.  The  political  contingent  of  the 
medical  profession  is  more  than  willing  to  en- 
croach upon  the  private  affairs  of  the  home  to 
an  extent  that  would  leave  us  very  little  to  say 
on  matters  that  can  never  be  anything  else  than 
our  own  exclusive  business. 

We  may  admit  that  some  of  the  vi6lims  of 
the  strain  and  stress  of  competitive  school  work 
are  not  in  robust  health,  that  they  are  survivors 
of  the  ills  of  the  weaning  period  and  of  the  in- 
fant-feeding period,  still  so  much  the  worse  for 

140 


Some  Failures  at  School 


having  been  sick  during  those  periods  and  des- 
tined to  constitute  a  large  share  of  the  mentally 
and  bodily  invalid  population  and  also  a  large 
share  of  that  one-third  of  the  population  that  is 
of  no  account ;  but  I  do  not  believe  that  these, 
of  defective  health  in  the  first  place,  form  more 
than  a  small  share  of  those  whose  failure  at 
school  is  attended  by  mental  disaster.  Of  course, 
at  the  time  of  the  breakdown,  the  victim's  ap- 
pearance is  suggestive  of  ill  health,  but  not  sug- 
gestive of  the  robust  health  that  we  know  most 
of  such  children  to  have  enjoyed  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  stress  and  strain — so  far  as  individ- 
ual observation  and  inquiry  can  determine. 

A  little  tot  is  well,  bright  and  happy,  and  is 
doing  well  the  little  work  that  is  allotted  to  the 
child  of  average  ability  at  her  age  at  school. 
The  mother's  pride  in  her  child  then  tempts  her 
to  induce  the  child  to  do  still  more,  still  better 
and  to  be  busier.  If  the  mother  talks  much  and 
speedily,  and  continually  engages  the  child  in 
talk  and  thought,  so  much  the  worse.  Talk  and 
thought  involve  mental  effort,  use  and  wear  and 
strain  of  instrumentalities  and  appropriation  of 
power ;  all  of  which  can  be  easily  carried  on  to 
excess,  especially  in  the  case  of  the  lone  child 
that  is  mostly  denied  the  more  natural,  better 
and  easier  occupation  of  association  and  play 
with  other  children  of  its  own  natural  selection. 

141 


Messages  to  Mothers 


And  this  child  is  still  a  mere  tot  when  music 
is  imposed  on  it.  Some  young  music-teacher 
would  like  to  have  her  for  a  pupil,  thinks  she  is 
old  enough,  has  others  younger  than  she,  and,  be- 
sides, the  younger  she  begins  the  better  the 
chances  for  future  excellence  in  the  art.  The 
mother  believes,  allows  and  encourages  both 
teacher  and  child,  and  now  some  half-hours  of 
each  week  are  appropriated  to  instruction  and 
practice.  An  experienced  music-teacher  tells  me 
that  she  does  not  take  little  tots  as  pupils;  they 
do  no  good,  she  says.  But  whether  they  make 
progress  or  not,  so  long  as  they  try,  it  costs  just 
as  much  power  and  wear  of  instrumentalities  to 
fail  as  it  does  to  succeed,  and  disappointment  and 
failure  militate  against  health  and  happiness 
much  more  than  success,  and  more  so  in  children 
than  in  adults.  Compulsory  study  of  music,  in 
advance  of  qualification  for  it,  is  most  likely  to 
disgust  the  child  with  the  undertaking  and  in- 
sure its  failure  in  that  line,  even  though  it  might 
at  a  later  age  under  proper  circumstances  have 
done  very  well  with  music. 

Supposing,  however,  that  a  child  does  for  a 
while  succeed  with  music  and  does  work  at  it 
somewhat  willingly,  then  its  school  work  will 
fail  to  show  good  results  and  it  will  lose  interest 
and  pleasure  in  the  same.  Even  if  for  some 
months  the  child  succeeds  fairly  well  with  both 

142 


Some  Failures  at  School 


the  proper  school  work  and  the  improperly  extra 
work  of  music,  it  must  then  certainly  follow  that 
the  child's  health  will  fail.  So  long  as  the  child 
is  cheerful  and  its  mental  undertakings  are  pro- 
gressing fairly  well,  its  digestion  must  be  con- 
sidered fairly  good;  for  when  digestion  is  defec- 
tive, conduct  and  work  become  defective  as 
results  of  suffering  and  diminution  of  power  de- 
rived from  foods.  Digestion  being  good  and 
overtime  work  continuing,  maintenance  must 
become  defective.  Overtime  work  is  that  which 
is  in  excess  of  the  capacity  of  the  working  in- 
strumentalities to  endure,  or  in  excess  of  the 
power  present  and  available  for  work.  If  the 
work  is  in  excess  of  the  capacity  of  the  working 
instrument,  then  so  much  the  worse  for  the 
instrument — the  brain  in  these  cases.  If  the 
work  is  in  excess  of  the  power  available  for  that 
purpose,  then  power  for  work  may  still  be  had 
by  diverting  it  from  some  other  uses.  Extraor- 
dinary demand  for  power  often  causes  diver- 
sion of  that  power  which  serves  the  purposes 
of  digestion.  Digestion  then  fails  more  or 
less  completely,  and  overtime  work  is  the 
cause  of  digestive  disorder  in  such  cases.  In 
other  cases,  like  the  one  we  are  considering, 
Digestion  remaining  normal,  the  overdraught  of 
power  is  derived  from  the  child's  power-storage 
battery,  its  fat.  The  child  must  therefore  grow 

143 


Messages  to  Mothers 


thinner  and  display  signs  of  defective  main- 
tenance. 

The  child  is  supposed  to  be  growing,  and 
growth  is  a  process  of  building  and  can  never 
under  any  circumstances  proceed  except  at  the 
expense  of  power  and  plenty  of  it.  But  overtime 
work  can  and  does  easily  divert  that  power  which 
is  present  and  available  for  growth,  and  appro- 
priate it,  but  only  to  the  detriment  of  necessary 
growth.  That  is  why  so  often  the  overworked 
child  does  not  grow  as  it  is  expected  to.  The  ar- 
rest of  growth  and  development,  by  diversion  of 
the  power  for  that  purpose  to  overtime  work,  may 
be  temporary  and  may  be  compensated  for 
by  unusually  rapid  growth  at  another  time. 
Overtime  work,  by  its  overdraught  on  the  com- 
mon stock  of  power,  is  responsible  for  the  failure 
of  another  very  important  function  already 
alluded  to,  the  general  function  of  maintenance 
of  that  normal  physical  integrity  called  health. 
In  this  condition  the  child  appears  well  and  is 
well,  with  every  organ  of  body  and  mind  in  nor- 
mal condition  of  working  efficiency,  which  is 
not  the  case  when  maintenance  is  defective;  for 
then,  although  the  child  may  eat  well,  digest 
well  and  do  all  the  allotted  work  well,  it  does 
not  appear  well,  and  some  special  defects  may  be 
observed  to  have  occured  in  the  condition  of  its 
teeth,  nails  and  skin  and  often  in  its  conduct. 

144 


Some  Failures  at  School 


A  growing  girl  under  stress  and  strain  of  school 
work,  plus  extras,  is  very  likely  to  be  difficult  to 
get  along  with  at  home.  "  We  can  hardly  live  in 
the  same  house  with  her,"  is  the  remark  that 
came  from  a  very  good  mother  in  such  a  case. 

A  commonly  prevalent  way  of  insuring  failure 
in  music,  or  other  like  extra,  is  to  begin  the  sys- 
tematic study  and  persistent  practice  of  it  at  the 
early  age  of  incompetence.  If  the  child  does 
nevertheless  succeed  with  the  extra,  it  must  fail 
in  some  other  respect.  The  danger  from  mental 
strain  and  stress  is  greatest  in  cases  of  children 
who  are  the  brightest  and  most  willing  workers; 
these  are  the  ones  that  are  most  likely  to  be  ap- 
plauded and  stimulated  to  do  still  better.  A  girl 
is  full  grown  at  sixteen,  seventeen  or  eighteen, 
and  will  then  have  the  qualification  to  under- 
stand and  appreciate,  and  the  power  to  try  for, 
achievement  in  music,  and  will  succeed  all  the 
better  for  having  previously  made  no  effort  in 
this  line  excepting  that  which  has  been  required 
of  her  in  the  little  rudimentary  study  of  music 
in  the  public  school  which  has  introduced  and 
interested  her  in  the  subject.  The  time  to  begin 
music  is  when  the  learner  wants  to  begin  and 
continue  its  study  and  practice.  With  many  the 
time  never  comes,  and  these  would  do  no  good 
with  the  opportunity  anyway. 

The  public  school  dispenses  a  little  instruction 

145 


Messages  to  Mothers 


in  music.  Even  though  a  child  has  time  for  more 
and  extra  music,  it  has  not  the  power  for  more, 
and  its  mental  instrumentalities,  its  brain,  will 
not  endure  the  additional  wear  and  strain  of 
more  study  and  practice.  In  its  allotment  of 
work,  the  public  school  reckons  on  the  pupil 
of  average  ability,  of  average  strength  of  instru- 
mentalities and  of  average  power  to  operate 
these  instrumentalities.  This  allotment  should 
always  be  open  to  criticism,  should  be  passed  on 
by  disinterested  judges  rather  than  by  those  who 
have  something  to  teach  and  want  to  be  em- 
ployed in  teaching  it.  When  the  allotment  of 
school  work  is  about  right,  it  will  be  easy  for 
the  strong,  hard  for  the  weak,  and  for  the  aver- 
age pupil  it  will  be  such  that  he  or  she  does  the 
work  reasonably  well  without  arrest  of  develop- 
ment or  incurring  any  defect  of  health  or  con- 
duct. 

According  to  the  public  school  scheme  in  Cali- 
fornia, there  are  eight  years  to  be  spent  in  the 
primary  and  grammar  schools,  four  years  in  the 
high  school  and  four  years  in  the  university. 
From  the  age  of  fourteen  to  twenty-two — from 
the  entrance  to  the  high  school  to  the  exit  from 
the  university — the  girl  does  all  the  mental 
work  that  the  boy  does,  and  it  may  be  admitted 
that  she  does  it  just  as  well.  The  girl,  how- 
ever, in  comparison  with  the  boy  at  this  time  of 

146 


Some  Failures  at  School 


life,  is  a  smaller  and  weaker  instrument  of  labor, 
and  must  therefore  work  harder,  must  endure 
greater  strain  and  stress  to  keep  even  with  the 
boy.  The  girl  has  a  smaller  digestive  apparatus, 
eats  less  and  develops  less  power  and  has  less 
for  working  purposes  than  the  boy.  In  the  case 
of  the  boy  after  his  growth  is  complete,  there  are 
no  extraordinary  functions  requiring  any  share 
of  his  power,  and  no  other  occupation,  or  affinity, 
or  inclination,  to  divert  either  power  or  attention 
from  his  work.  He  is  not  missing  nor  neglecting 
nor  sacrificing  anything,  and  he  gets  through  col- 
lege just  as  big,  strong  and  as  well  as  he  would 
have  emerged  from  eight  years'  service  in  any 
other  occupation. 

A  girl  during  these  eight  years  has  an  extra 
function  to  be  maintained  and  special  organs  to 
be  developed  at  the  expense  of  much  of  her 
power.  She  has  a  love  of  home,  and,  unless  she 
makes  up  her  mind  to  abandon  it  and  with  it 
to  abandon  her  natural  and  only  ultimately 
happy  sphere,  she  must  cultivate  that  love  of 
home  and  develop  it  into  a  familiarity  with  all 
the  details  of  its  maintenance  and  love  of  all  its 
contents,  associations  and  environments.  The 
prime  requisite  is  character,  to  be  really  a  gen- 
tleman and  really  a  lady.  In  the  case  of  the 
lady  it  is  demanded,  and  she  uses  much  diligence 
to  comply  with  the  demand,  that  she  appear  her 

147 


Messages  to  Mothers 


best  and  dress  her  best,  consistently  with  good 
judgment  which  she  must  possess.  She  is  under 
an  eternal  obligation  to  be  charming.  The  eight 
years  of  strain,  stress  and  anxiety  of  mental 
work  on  time  and  under  orders,  in  the  case  of 
the  average  well-prepared  girl  at  this  formative 
time  of  life,  may  not  be  at  all  in  excess  of  what 
her  brain  as  an  instrument  of  labor  can  endure; 
but  the  amount  of  power  which  the  schedule  of 
work  under  domination  involves,  which  must  be 
expended  for  the  achievement,  is  more  than  is 
naturally  appropriated  for  this  extremely  artifi- 
cial purpose.  The  work  is  done  and  well  done, 
but  at  what  cost  ?  Power  for  this  artificial  pur- 
pose is  diverted  from  natural  purposes,  which 
therefore  fail  more  or  less  completely.  Among 
the  results  there  is  disorder  of  the  girl's  peculiar 
function;  there  is  constipation,  for  even  the 
bowel  requires  power  for  its  operation;  there  is 
defective  digestion,  and  defective  maintenance 
which  can  be  perceived  at  a  glance  and  tells 
what  a  sacrifice  this  higher  coeducation  costs 
the  young  woman. 

She  has  little  time  and  less  power  to  develop 
her  natural  love  of  home  into  any  intimacy  with 
the  details  of  its  maintenance,  into  any  attach- 
ment for  its  contents,  its  associations,  its  environ- 
ments or  memories.  For  eight  years  the  young 
lady  hurries  to  and  from  school,  the  grace  of 

148 


Some  Failures  at  School 


carriage  fails  to  be  acquired,  yields  to  the  hurry 
habit;  her  hair  might  be  done  up  more  neatly; 
there  is  room  for  dressing  more  becomingly  and 
in  better  taste,  but  there  is  not  time,  or,  being 
"dead  tired,"  there  is  no  power.  The  taste  for 
personal  appearance  is  so  long  neglected  that  it 
is  lost  never  to  be  regained;  or,  if  there  still  re- 
mains the  desire  to  appear  her  best,  she  has  neg- 
lected to  acquire  the  art  of  materializing  that 
laudable  desire.  Her  voice  has  the  capacity  for 
development  to  an  extent  which  alone  would 
make  her  charming;  but  that  also  must  yield 
to  the  pursuit  of  the  prescribed  work  that  the 
men  do.  Finally,  she  interests  but  she  does  not 
inspire;  she  commands  respect  but  not  admira- 
tion. Her  speech  is  hurried  and  her  delivery 
lacks  grace,  elegance  and  ease,  and  her  neglected 
voice  is  hopelessly  and  forever  out  of  tune.  We 
are  much  interested  in  what  she  knows  and  can 
do,  but  we  are  not  interested  in  what  she  is. 

The  eight  years  of  almost  complete  diversion 
of  time,  attention  and  effort  from  home,  and  a 
few  more  years  in  some  professional  or  official 
pursuit,  spoil  a  woman  for  woman's  place  in  the 
home.  Of  such  a  woman  it  may  be  foretold  that 
she  will  not  be  a  success  as  a  housekeeper,  wife 
or  mother;  the  home  of  her  married  life  is  the 
abode  of  the  ills  that  I  have  attempted  to  ex- 
plain. The  misery  brought  by  these  ills  will 

149 


Messages  to  Mothers 


more  than  balance  what  happiness  prevails 
within  the  walls  of  such  a  home.  It  was,  for  ex- 
ample, in  such  a  home,  abounding  in  wealth, 
learning  and  piety,  that  a  son  and  daughter  died 
in  infancy  and  the  surviving  child  was  raised 
and  educated  to  the  highest  possible  conventional 
degree  of  excellence  and  ill  health,  and  then 
committed  suicide.  And  this  is  just  one  real  ex- 
ample of  many  tragedies  that  are  all  of  a  kind, 
differing  only  in  detail  and  degree. 

The  young  woman  who  ventures  alongside  of 
the  young  man  in  the  higher  coeducational  insti- 
tution of  learning,  does  all  the  work  he  does, 
settles  in  his  sphere,  fails  in  it  and  in  her  own  also, 
and  is  in  the  end  unnatural,  unwell,  more  or  less 
helpless  and  unhappy.  The  American  learned 
wife  and  mother  who  continues  her  pursuit  of 
learning  incompatibly  with  her  duties  at  home, 
is  a  shining  bad  example,  a  fallacious  ideal,  for 
the  younger  women  of  doubtful  ambition  to 
look  to. 

The  education  of  women  for  their  natural 
sphere  is  just  as  necessary  as  the  education  of 
men  for  their  sphere,  but  the  one  differs  very 
much  from  the  other  even  if  there  is  much  in 
common.  Judged  by  the  outcome,  a  woman  in  a 
school  adapted  for  men  is  just  as  absurd  and  im- 
practicable as  a  man  would  be  in  a  school 
adapted  for  women.  The  tree  is  judged  by  its 

150 


Some  Failures  at  School 


fruits,  the  workman  by  his  work,  and  we  may 
judge  schools  by  the  people  who  have  emerged 
from  them. 

Professor  Dr.  Emil  Reich  seems  to  have  studied 
the  relations  of  husband  and  wife,  in  regard  to 
the  affairs  of  each,  in  at  least  several  European 
countries.  He  considers  the  Englishwoman  the 
most  beautiful  and  clever  woman  in  the  world. 
Other  observers  generally  agree  with  him.  So 
much  for  the  home,  the  school  and  the  environ- 
ment in  which  she  grew  and  was  cultivated. 
"Yet  with  all  her  charms,"  says  the  Professor, 
"  she  has  less  influence  over  men  than  any  other 
whom  I  know.  With  beauty  to  attract  and  with 
brains  to  enliven  she  is  only  a  figurehead  in  the 
social  scheme  of  British  life." 

The  Englishwoman  is  a  modest,  quiet,  shining 
light,  emitting  powerfully  effective  rays  of  in- 
fluence that  the  utilitarian  Professor  did  not  take 
account  of  and  the  silent  effects  of  which  he 
must  have  failed  to  observe.  The  Englishwoman 
attends  diligently  and  personally  to  her  home 
and  children,  the  effect  of  which  is  the  influence 
that  tends  to  make  her  daughters  like  herself 
and  her  sons  lovers  of  home  and  founders  of 
homes  like  home.  Only  a  figurehead?  A 
woman's  functions  are,  to  be  and  to  do.  She  may 
not  have  opportunities  for  doing  much,  but  there 
is  no  excuse  for  a  physically  beautiful  woman 

151 


Messages  to  Mothers 


being  anything  less  than  simply  great,  and  it  is 
by  virtue  of  this  that  she  is  what  the  Professor 
concedes,  and  she  certainly  emits  an  influence 
proportional  to  what  she  is,  not  proportional  to 
what  she  does. 

"  And  worst  of  all,"  continues  the  Professor, 
"she  does  not  demand  to  share  her  husband's 
work."  The  Englishwoman  has  quite  enough  to 
do  in  the  sphere  of  her  home,  first  with  her 
mother,  then  in  the  home  of  her  own.  Even  if 
she  has  time  to  share  her  husband's  work,  she 
has  not  the  proper  instrumentalities  and  has  not 
the  power.  She  has  not  the  qualifications  for 
men's  work;  she  had  not  the  capacity  for  acquir- 
ing such  qualifications;  she  is  not  built  for  or 
adapted  to  men's  work.  Had  such  qualification 
been  attempted,  it  would  have  been  at  the  sacri- 
fice of  all  that  makes  her  charming  and  with  the 
certainty  of  failure  in  both  the  husband's  sphere 
and  in  her  own.  The  Englishwoman  minds  her 
own  business, — that  alone  is  an  item  in  her  list 
of  charms.  In  her  own  business  she  does  wonder- 
fully well,  she  would  only  lose  by  trying  to  do 
more. 

A  great  many  commercially  inclined  people 
agree  with  the  Professor  that  "  a  woman's  duty 
does  not  begin  and  end  in  being  a  good  house- 
wife and  a  faithful  mother."  A  great  many  peo- 
ple will  also  agree  that,  when  she  gets  into  the 

152 


Some  Failures  at  School 


position  of  wife  and  mother,  her  duties  certainly 
do  end  in  that  sphere — the  only  natural,  the  fit- 
test, the  happiest,  the  most  fruitful,  the  most 
efficiently  influential  to  the  widest  extent  and 
greatest  length  of  time. 

In  the  English  home,  the  English  Church  and 
in  the  English  young  ladies'  school,  by  processes 
of  cultivation  as  well  as  education,  by  the  natu- 
ral, agreeable  and  alluring  method  of  example 
more  than  by  the  artificial  method  of  precept, 
without  strain  or  stress  or  hurry  or  any  danger 
of  sacrifice  of  health,  the  Englishwoman  acquires 
that  excellence  of  manners,  voice,  diction ;  that 
exquisite  grace  of  carriage,  movement  and 
speech;  that  simple  artistic  taste  in  dress  and 
adornment,  and  that  little  learning,  that  consti- 
tute her  "  the  most  beautiful  and  clever  woman 
in  the  world."  But  the  Professor,  who  sees  this 
intrinsic  merit  and  is  evidently  inspired  by  it 
and  is  so  far  influenced  as  to  publish  this  state- 
ment to  the  world,  fails  to  see  that  such  women 
must  inspire  their  husbands,  their  children,  the 
community  and  the  nation  and  the  world,  for 
the  Englishwoman  is  the  wonder  of  the  world  of 
women. 

And  yet  the  English  girl,  considered  as  raw 
material,  is  not  pretty  at  all;  the  marvelous  ef- 
fe6l  is  all  achieved  by  a  well-adapted  system  of 
education  and  cultivation  compatible  with  the 

153 


Messages  to  Mothers 


nature  of  woman,  her  health  and  her  sphere. 
The  Englishwoman,  after  all,  is  not  our  chief 
concern;  I  only  mean  to  suggest  inspection  of 
the  means  by  which  she  achieves  her  excellence 
and  retains  her  health. 

The  published  obituary  does  not  generally  state 
that  a  premature  death  was  due  to  strain  and 
stress  of  mental  effort,  nor  does  the  death  certi- 
ficate mention  such  primary  cause;  but  one  can 
see  from  such  accounts  that  the  mental  effort  of 
the  child's  occupation  was  unnatural  and  exces- 
sive and  must  have  reduced  it  to  a  condition  in 
which  it  became  an  easy  non-resisting  prey  to 
disease.  A  boy  fourteen  years  of  age  dies,  and  is 
referred  to  as  having  been  "  an  unusually  bright 
boy."  But  it  must  have  cost  the  boy  a  tremen- 
dous amount  of  premature  effort  to  become  so 
bright. 

In  the  obituary  of  a  girl  eleven  years  of  age,  I 
read  as  follows :  "  Although  young  in  years,  the 
little  girl  was  one  of  the  brightest  pupils  in  her 
class  in  school.  She  was  an  accomplished  musi- 
cian and  displayed  unusual  oratorical  ability. 
Her  ability  as  a  musician  gained  her  a  host  of 
admiring  friends,  both  in  Berkeley  and  in  Oak- 
land, where  she  had  given  numerous  recitals." 
Accomplished  musician,  unusual  oratorical  abil- 
ity, had  given  numerous  recitals,  eleven  years  of 
age  and  doing  the  regular  allotment  of  school 

154 


Some  Failures  at  School 


work  to  the  highest  degree  of  efficiency,  therein 
lay  the  primary  cause  of  death,  and  it  matters 
little  what  may  have  been  the  last  straw  or  the 
immediate  cause.  The  human  brain  at  eleven 
years  of  age  cannot  endure  so  much  work,  and 
the  human  digestive  apparatus  at  eleven  years 
of  age  does  not  develop  power  enough  to  do  the 
work  involved  in  so  much  achievement  of  such 
excellence. 

It  was  announced  that  the  children  of  a  kin- 
dergarten would  give  an  exhibition  of  their  work 
and  how  it  was  performed,  that  the  entertainment 
would  include  several  instrumental  and  vocal 
selections,  and  would  begin  at  half  past  seven  in 
the  evening,  and  that  following  the  exercises 
light  refreshments  would  be  served, — evidently 
a  long  program,  to  end  at  a  late  hour  for  chil- 
dren so  young.  How  much  the  showing  and  ex- 
plaining of  the  work  and  of  the  instrumental 
and  vocal  selections  the  little  children  of  five 
and  six  years  of  age  were  to  do,  I  do  not  know, 
but  to  be  called  on  for  anything  of  the  kind  in 
this  formal  public  manner  at  a  time  of  day  when 
they  should  naturally  and  necessarily  be  going 
to  bed,  is  subjecting  their  delicate  mental  instru- 
ments very  prematurely  to  unnatural  tension 
and  strain  and  at  the  time  of  day  when  children 
are  tired.  And  if  the  children  were  to  remain 
to  the  end  of  the  show,  including  the  light 

155 


Messages  to  Mothers 


refreshments,  they  must  have  been  kept  up  to  a 
very  late  hour,  considering  their  ages,  and  they 
must  have  taken  their  light  refreshments  at  a 
time  when  they  were  most  exhausted  and  could 
hardly  be  expected  to  have  power  to  digest  said 
refreshments,  which  would  then  lie  in  their 
stomachs,  spoil  more  or  less  and  serve  as  cause 
for  a  restless  night. 

These  little  children  and  their  achievements 
and  their  newest  clothes  were  on  exhibition. 
They  performed  and  did  their  best,  with  all  their 
might,  under  the  disadvantage  of  the  lime-light 
situation.  At  the  fag-end  of  the  day  they  were 
tired  by  the  day's  ordinary  doings;  they  were 
then  made  overtired  by  the  preparations  for  the 
evening;  then  at  a  point  worse  than  the  fag-end 
of  the  day,  in  the  night,  with  power  exhausted, 
the  reserve  of  the  storage  battery  already  drawn 
upon  under  the  spurs  of  the  lime-light  stimula- 
tion, they  now,  late  at  night,  stimulated  by  in- 
sistence and  the  extraordinary  character  of  the 
refreshments,  take  into  their  stomachs  a  con- 
glomerate mess,  more  or  less  artificial,  for  the 
digestion  of  which  there  is  now  no  power  re- 
maining and  now  no  stimulus  to  make  the  stor- 
age battery  of  fat  yield  power  to  digest  this 
unnatural  and  untimely  mess.  Not  even  the 
sterilizing  gastric  juice  is  supplied;  even  that 
little  detail  cannot  be  performed  without  power. 

156 


Some  Failures  at  School 


So  the  mess  lies  unsterilized  in  the  stomach,  free 
to  ferment;  and  whatever  microbian  life  may 
have  lodged  on  these  refreshments,  from  the 
second-hand  air  of  the  crowd,  is  free  not  only  to 
multiply  itself  by  two  every  twenty  minutes, 
but  is  also  free  to  pass  on  into  the  intestine,  still 
increasing,  and  from  there  invade  and  colonize 
many  parts  and  almost  any  part  of  the  body. 

The  stomach  is  a  comparatively  safe  place  into 
which  to  receive  microbian  life  regardless  of  the 
variety,  so  long  as  there  is  a  normal  supply  of 
gastric  juice  to  make  its  destruction  sure.  But 
gastric  juice  is  not  produced  by  perpetual  motion; 
it  requires  real  power  to  produce  it,  and  there- 
fore all  one's  might  should  not  be  appropriated 
for  other  purposes  all  the  time,  else  there  is 
no  power  for  gastric  juice  nor  for  digestion.  The 
power  of  resistance  to  disease  must  often  mean 
the  power  to  supply  gastric  juice.  For  this  un- 
natural and  perilous  usage  of  children  both 
teacher  and  parents  are  to  blame,  but  the  child 
suffers  the  penalty.  There  are  days  enough  and 
long  enough  for  all  such  public  exhibitions  and 
juvenile  tryouts,  and  the  resort  to  night  times  is 
not  necessary.  Parents,  of  course,  mean  well,  are 
consciously  guilty  of  no  greater  sin,  perhaps, 
than  pride  in  their  children's  progress  and 
achievements,  which  is  no  sin  at  all  until  it  is  al- 
lowed to  materialize  so  far  as  to  endanger  the 

157 


Messages  to  Mothers 


child's  health.  When  death  ensues,  some  disease 
is  mentioned  as  having  been  the  cause,  but  no 
mention  is  made  of  the  cause  which  so  far 
wrecked  the  child,  brain  and  body,  as  to  leave  it 
an  easy  prey  to  the  illness  which  served  as  the 
immediate  cause  of  death. 

"Little  eight-year-old  Gladys  Bennett,  who 
was  called  the  child  prima  donna,  and  who  was 
an  infant  prodigy  from  the  days  of  her  baby- 
hood, will  no  more  thrill  applausive  audiences 
with  her  renderings  of  music  by  the  world's 
greatest  composers,  with  voice  and  violin." 
"While  other  children  less  nervous,  less  sensi- 
tive, than  frail  little  Gladys  Bennett,  were  play- 
ing in  the  fresh  air  and  invigorating  sunshine, 
she,  cloistered  within  doors,  was  striving  to  draw 
from  the  strings  of  her  violin  strains  of  music 
which  would  have  taxed  the  strength  of  an  ex- 
perienced and  hardened  virtuoso."  These  two 
paragraphs  I  have  copied  from  the  San  Francisco 
Examiner ,  September  8,  1905.  The  original 
consisted  of  more  than  a  column,  large  display 
headings  and  a  picture.  Each  generation  of 
mothers  has  about  the  same  lessons  to  learn. 
Here  was  an  opportunity  to  learn  a  very  useful 
lesson  from  the  very  sad  example  and  experience 
of  another.  One  such  example,  one  such  lesson 
in  display  type  and  a  picture,  is  certainly  enough 
to  serve  the  purpose  of  instruction.  But  instruc- 

158 


Some  Failures  at  School 


tion  without  repetition  of  instruction  generally 
fails  to  make  an  impression.  So  even  if  their 
mothers  do  remember  the  case  of  Gladys  Ben- 
nett, the  coming  infant  musical  and  otherwise 
favored  prodigies  will  still  continue  to  be  in 
danger  of  the  unnatural,  extraordinary  and  pro- 
longed mental  strains  that  their  mothers  are  yet 
likely  to  urge  upon  them  while  yet  in  their  ten- 
derest  years. 

The  newspaper  accounts  of  the  disastrous  mis- 
takes of  some  people  serve  the  extremely  useful 
purpose  of  warning  to  other  people  who  are  in 
danger  of  making  like  mistakes;  that  is,  if  the 
real  moral  of  the  example  is  perceived,  or  the 
true  conclusion  of  the  account  is  understood. 
Unfortunately,  the  real  merit  of  the  example 
and  the  account  is  concealed  more  or  less  com- 
pletely by  the  alleged  immediate  cause  of  death. 
The  immediate  cause  is  required  in  the  certificate 
of  death,  and  this  is  what  the  public  takes  cog- 
nizance of.  The  public  will  generally  overlook 
the  real  primary  cause  of  death;  it  will  gener- 
ally fail  to  see  that  the  overtime  work,  the  ex- 
cessive strain  of  over-stimulated  effort  at  an  un- 
natural occupation,  at  an  untimely  season  of  life, 
at  an  immature  and  incompetent  age,  so  nearly 
killed  the  subject  that  she  falls  an  easy  prey  to 
the  illness  which  served  as  the  last  straw.  Such 
last  straw  is  not  always  necessary;  overtime  work 

159 


Messages  to  Mothers 


alone  has  killed  and  half-killed,  paralyzed,  many 
adults  that  I  know  of  even  in  my  small  field  of 
observation.  In  the  examples  mentioned,  our 
evil  subject  assumed  gigantic  proportions  and 
did  its  extremely  cruel  worst.  For  one  such  ex- 
treme case  of  premature,  prolonged  and  fast  driv- 
ing of  children,  there  are  fifty  others  in  which 
the  harm  done  appears  so  slight  that  the  real  evil 
is  hardly  recognized  at  all;  it  is  almost  always 
occluded  by  a  digestive  or  "  nervous "  disorder 
that  appears  as  a  first  result  of  the  evil  we  are 
considering.  Treatment  is  erroneously  and  fruit- 
lessly directed  to  this  result,  this  digestive  disor- 
der, constipation,  irritability,  epilepsy  and  so  on. 
Bright,  speedy  and  ambitious  children  with  am- 
bitious parents  are  most  in  peril. 

The  dull,  slow,  stubborn  child  is  safe;  the  sub- 
conscious mind  in  his  case  insists  on  minding  its 
own  business.  Feeling  governs  in  his  case,  and 
the  child  is  simply  loyal  to  his  own  inerrant 
nature.  So  persistently  true  to  himself  is  he  that 
he  will  not  yield  to  any  attempt  to  make  him 
work  at  a  speed  which  exceeds  his  adaptation,  or 
to  an  extent  which  exceeds  his  available  power, 
or  which  exceeds  the  capacity  of  his  instrumen- 
talities to  endure.  Nature  in  him  will  attend  to 
the  child  first,  its  digestion,  its  maintenance,  its 
growth  and  development;  after  these  are  pro- 
vided for,  the  child  will  do  what  is  required  to 

160 


Some  Failures  at  School 


the  extent  of  power  present  and  available.  Such 
a  boy  or  girl  may  not  be  regarded  as  a  "  promis- 
ing" one,  but,  given  only  the  conditions  for  good 
health,  he  or  she  is  most  likely  to  be  a  most  use- 
ful member  of  the  community  when  the  work- 
ing time  of  life  has  come. 

While  the  pursuit  of  learning  at  school  has 
grown  to  be  comparatively  easy,  nevertheless 
the  amount  of  work  allotted  and  adapted  to  the 
average  learner  of  average  ability  is  such  as  to 
require,  if  well  done,  about  all  the  strain  that  his 
brain  can  safely  endure  and  about  all  the  power 
that  he  can  appropriate  to  such  purpose.  Any 
additional  work,  therefore,  of  mind  or  muscle, 
is  overwork  or  overtime  work.  There  are  many 
inconspicuous  but  commonly  observed  cases  of 
failure  at  school  under  favorable  conditions  of 
good  health  and  care.  In  such  cases  it  will  be 
found  that  the  child's  power  is  diverted  to,  and 
its  brain  is  being  used  for,  other  purposes  in  ad- 
dition to  its  school  work.  A  boy  fails  to  hold  his 
place  with  his  class,  and  it  is  found  that  in  accord- 
ance with  his  parents'  will,  and  somewhat  against 
his  own,  he  is  taking  violin  lessons  and  spending 
much  time  and  power  in  practice  while  other 
boys  are  out  playing  or  doing  nothing  but  just 
resting  from  school  work,  and  growing. 

Another  boy  is  found  to  be  prematurely  shar- 
ing the  white  man's  burden  of  disseminating 

161 


Messages  to  Mothers 


intelligence  by  distributing  newspapers:  a  good 
scheme  for  an  old  enough  boy  in  the  case  of  an 
evening  paper;  but  in  the  case  of  a  morning 
paper,  the  boy's  very  necessary  sleep  is  reduced 
an  hour  or  two,  which  in  a  year  amounts  to  a 
sufficient  shortage  to  account  for  some  arrest  of 
development.  He  must  entertain  some  nightly 
anxiety  in  regard  to  the  certainty  of  early  ris- 
ing, and  is  therefore  already  nursing  the  anxiety 
habit.  He  hurries  off  to  the  base  of  supplies  at 
twice  the  speed  and  four  times  the  power  of  his 
normal  rate  of  movement.  He  is  expected  to 
hurry  until  the  last  of  his  customers  has  been 
served,  and  he  is  thus  early  initiated  into  the 
hurry  habit.  If  he  had  breakfast  before  start- 
ing, it  was  too  early  for  an  appetite,  and  after 
eating,  when  much  power  was  required  for  diges- 
tion, he  drew  upon  his  power  to  the  maximum 
possible  extent  in  making  his  hurried  rounds. 
If  he  did  not  eat  before  starting,  he  now  hurries 
home,  arriving  rather  late  for  finding  the  family 
breakfast  at  its  best,  and  by  nine  o'clock  he  takes 
his  seat  in  school  a  little  tired  and  sleepy  and  is 
not  going  to  do  his  work  as  well  and  as  cheer- 
fully as  if  that  work  were  his  exclusive  business. 
Now  he  is  by  the  circumstances  of  the  case  forced 
into  the  bad  habit  of  being  content  with  work 
that  is  short  of  being  well  done. 

The  school  work  is  already  so  much  that  if 

162 


Some  Failures  at  School 


well  done,  there  remains  scant  enough  power  for 
growth  and  the  minimum  recreation  necessary 
to  growth  and  the  happy  disposition  he  has  and 
will  need  through  life.  To  get  along  poorly  at 
school  takes  the  pleasure  out  of  the  boy's  school- 
going  occupation  and  serves  as  the  first  step 
toward  quitting  school  in  favor  of  some  wage- 
earning  occupation.  This  is  no  misfortune,  for 
in  connection  with  an  occupation,  or  simultane- 
ously with  the  pursuit  of  it,  he  can  acquire  learn- 
ing and  experience  that  will  constitute  a  good 
education.  With  health,  integrity,  ability  and 
industry,  a  boy  will  prosper  beyond  all  reason- 
able expectation,  whether  he  go  through  college 
or  not.  The  boy  who  goes  through  school  and 
college  overworked  and  underfed  and  with  all 
possible  self-denial  generally,  will  be  physically 
and  mentally  tired  in  the  end,  and  will  at  best 
only  drift  into  a  position  of  mediocrity  with 
small  chances  for  promotion. 

Girls  are  less  capable  of  enduring  extra  mental 
work  than  boys.  Nature  has  imposed  upon  girls 
a  function  which  is  so  exhaustive  of  power  as  to 
leave  them  not  enough  to  compete  with  boys 
during  the  high-school  age.  If  the  girl  insists 
on  doing  the  allotted  work  of  the  high  school 
and  of  the  college  for  boys,  she  can  do  it,  but  it 
seems  that  the  performance  is  likely  to  determine 
her  future  sterility.  The  reason  seems  to  be  that 

163 


Messages  to  Mothers 


the  power  which  was  naturally  provided,  was 
present  and  available  for  development  of  the  re- 
productive organs,  was  diverted  during  the  eight 
years  of  this  educational  undertaking  to  the 
strenuous  mental  work  thereof.  This  undertak- 
ing by  the  average  girl  requires  so  nearly  all 
her  might,  so  nearly  all  her  power,  as  to  leave 
too  little  power  for  the  completion  of  her  devel- 
opment. She  is  likely  to  fail  in  her  function  of 
reproduction,  because  her  organs  of  reproduction 
are  defective  in  development  and  therefore  in- 
competent. 

Study  must  be  rated  as  purely  original  mental 
work,  and,  as  already  explained,  an  hour  of  such 
work  costs  as  much  power  as  two  and  a  halt 
hours  of  hard  manual  labor.  Three  hours  a  day, 
five  days  a  week,  actually  applied  to  study, 
would  tax  the  public  high-school  pupil  quite 
enough,  and  four  hours  a  day  for  state-college 
study,  seems  to  me,  would  be  the  average  safe 
maximum  limit.  Study  in  excess  is  overtime 
work.  All  night  work  in  addition  to  day  work  is 
overtime  work.  The  day  is  long  enough,  night 
work  is  unnatural.  Those  who  work  at  night  are 
less  efficient  in  the  day  and  are  as  a  rule  poor 
sleepers,  oversensitive,  irritable  and  dyspeptic; 
the  net  results  show  that  it  does  not  pay  in  the 
case  of  man,  woman  or  child.  Everybody  knows 
it  does  not  pay  in  the  case  of  the  domestic  animal. 

164 


Some  Failures  at  School 


If  a  girl  is  to  be  qualified  for  success  in  the 
maintenance  of  a  happy  home  of  her  own,  she 
must  devote  time,  interest,  effort  and  power,  by 
the  side  of  her  mother,  to  the  affairs  of  home. 
If  she  is  to  have  a  natural  woman's  regard  for 
her  own  personal  appearance,  she  must  devote 
time,  interest,  effort  and  power  to  the  arts  in- 
volved in  the  making  of  her  clothes,  the  care  of 
her  hair,  the  cultivation  of  her  voice  and  her 
manners  generally.  When  a  girl  gives  a  mini- 
mum of  working  attention  to  this  much,  the 
present  excessive  public-school  requirement  will 
be  even  more  than  she  can  well  attend  to  besides. 
Music  in  addition  cannot  be  taken  seriously 
without  failure  in  school  work,  or  failure  of 
health  or  of  growth,  and  physical,  mental  and 
moral  development.  The  work  in  the  public 
high  school  is,  I  am  sure,  too  much  for  the  aver- 
age girl.  When  we  shall  have  separate  high 
schools  for  girls,  the  governing  boards  may  see 
the  wisdom  of  requiring  much  less  work  of  girls 
and  perhaps  of  a  somewhat  different  and  less 
strenuous  character,  and  allowing  some  time  for 
music  and  for  those  home  and  personal  details 
which  make  the  less  learned  Englishwoman 
much  more  charming  than  the  more  learned 
American  woman.  Precept  is  artificial,  ineffect- 
ive and  not  impressive.  Example  is  natural, 
impressive  and  effective  in  the  training  of  girls 

165 


Messages  to  Mothers 


in  those  matters  that  are  to  develop  them  into 
fine  women.  Teachers  of  girls,  therefore,  ought 
to  be  good,  healthy  examples  of  all  that  a  girl 
aspires  to  in  the  way  of  personal  improvement. 


166 


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